Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

The poem begins: I am turning 65 years of age. And so I am thinking about how am I growing old. How am I becoming an elder? How am I becoming an elder? I would love to go back to China and be old because there we hear that older people are loved and appreciated. I can't grow old in America. America is a country for young people. So I can't grow old here. Should I go back to China and grow old there? So those are the questions that I'm asking…

As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me. (p99)

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (p87)

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (p87)

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. (p64)

Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. (p61)

I had to get out of hating range. (p52)

From the fairy tales, I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye. (p48)

No husband of mine will say, "I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is." Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. (p48)

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. (p29)

Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing. (p26)

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. (p19)

The difference between mad people and sane people...is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over. (p159, "At the Western Palace")

"We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment." (Brave Orchid, p154, "At the Western Palace")

Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together. (p12, "No Name Woman")