“Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft ”
Maxine Hong Kingston“To me success means effectiveness in the world that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world-that I am able to change it in positive ways.”
Maxine Hong Kingston“Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.”
Maxine Hong Kingston“Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don’t sleep like eyes. Those who live by the sea examine the driftwood and glass balls that float from foreign ships. They let scores of invisible imps loose out of found bottles. In a scoop of salt water, they revive the dead blobs that have been beached in storms and tides: fins, whiskers, and gills unfold; mouths, eyes, and colors bloom and spread. Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity.”
Maxine Hong Kingston“The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.”
Maxine Hong Kingston“In a time of destruction, create something.”
Maxine Hong Kingston“Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft ”
Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet“Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior“You can't eat straight A's.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior“A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior“I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing.I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life