Maxine Hong Kingston

"I want English professors to put my books on regular reading lists. An American writer. We have worked hard for fairness in the job market and housing and schooling, and our art should not be segregated out. Readers ought not to have boring preconceptions of what a story is about just because its author is "ethnic." "Ethnic writer" and "feminist writer" have been used dismissively."

"Of course, I'm an ethnic writer, and only benighted people see ethnics as not partaking of the macrocosmic. And only Chinese Americans who are very mad would kick an admirer of Henry James and William Carlos Williams out of our family"

"If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation. ("Fire" opening line)"

"Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill. ("Earth" p269)"

"The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again. (Epilogue)"

"Children, everybody, here's what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment. (Epilogue)"

"When the peace demonstrations turned violent, and doves and hawks were using the same tactics-revolutionary and governmental provocateurs infiltrating parades and vigils, Governor Ray Gun ordering the National Guard and helicopters to tear-gas and shoot up People's Park and Berkeley (they killed James Rector, and blinded an artist)-Wittman Ah Sing and Taña made up their minds to leave America. (first lines)"

"The wind is time blowing by. (p189)"

"In the whole dark universe, I've met you at this bit of fire, and we speak with each other, and listen to each other. All of life and the war led up to this present time of being here with you. (p209)"

"Leaning with his back against the door, he could hear this voice, then that one. All was silent but for one voice at a time telling a life. (p214)"

"Linda wrote in her Ph.D. dissertation: "Vietnam duty provided the most unambiguous source of antiwar sentiment." War causes peace. (p227)"

"Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn-omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens-and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. Entertained it. (first lines)"

"The lights of the city on hills make a vertical shimmer from sky straight into the water, like a backdrop, like a dream. (p37)"

"He did too have a philosophy of life: Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people. (p223)"

"She's lived for a long time, and in many places. Lucky to have her here now. (p268)"

"He spent the rest of the night looking for the plot of our ever-branching lives. A job can't be the plot of life, and not a soapy love-marriage-divorce--and hell no, not Viet Nam. (p288)"

"What's crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war. (p305)"

"Whatever there is when there isn't war has to be invented. What do people do in peace? Peace has barely been thought. (p306)"

"Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it. (p306)"

"They think that Americans are either white or Black. I can't wear that civil-rights button with the Black hand and the white hand shaking each other. I have a nightmare-after duking it out, someday Blacks and whites will shake hands over my head. I'm the little yellow man beneath the bridge of their hands and overlooked. (p307)"

"Do I have to explain why 'exotic' pisses me off, and 'not exotic' pisses me off? They've got us in a bag, which we aren't punching our way out of. To be exotic or to be not-exotic is not a question about Americans or about humans. Okay, okay. Take me, for example. I'm common ordinary. Plain black sweater. Blue jeans. Tennis shoes ordinaire. Clean soo mun shaven. What's so exotic? My hair's too long, huh? Is that it? It's the hair? (p308)"

"Those critics who do not explore why and how this book is different but merely point out its difference as a flaw have a very disturbing idea about the role of the writer. Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself? Why should I be denied an individual artistic vision?"

"When I write most deeply, fly the highest, reach the furthest, I write like a diarist-that is, my audience is myself. I dare to write anything because I can burn my papers at any moment. I do not begin with the thought of an audience peering over my shoulder, nor do I find my being understood a common occurrence anyway-a miracle when it happens."

"Apparently many Caucasians in America do not know that a person born in the USA is automatically American, no matter how he or she may look...Too many people use those two words interchangeably, 'American' and "Caucasian"."

"To say we are inscrutable, mysterious, exotic denies us our common humanness, because it says that we are so different from a regular human being that we are by our nature intrinsically unknowable. Thus the stereotyper aggressively defends ignorance. Nor do we want to be called not inscrutable, exotic, mysterious. These are false ways of looking at us. We do not want to be measured by a false standard at all."

"I hope my writing has many layers, as human beings have layers."

"Once upon a time, a man, named Tang Ao, looking for the Gold Mountain, crossed an ocean, and came upon the Land of Women. The women immediately captured him, not on guard against ladies. When they asked Tang Ao to come along, he followed; if he had had male companions, he would've winked over his shoulder. (first lines)"

"Mental work was harder than physical work, although it was not exactly the mind that teaching strained. (p41)"

"He sings melodies that wind like ribbons into the vistas. (p75)"

"The hero's home has its own magic. (p81)"

"Fancy lovers never last. (p81)"

"I don't want anybody attached to me forever with gratitude. (p85)"

"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. (p90)"

"As you know, any plain person you chance to meet can prove to be a powerful immortal in disguise come to test you. (p119)"

"He repeated himself so often that some of what he said seeped into the ears. (p190)"

""You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you." (First line, "No Name Woman")"

"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")"

""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")"

"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")"

"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)"

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

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

"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)"

"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)"

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

"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)"

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

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

"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)"

"Joy and life exist nowhere but the present."