Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

“I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began.”

“This is terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away. ”

“I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing.”

“You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born.”

“Be careful what you say. It comes true.”

″‘Do you really think I can be a mother of sons? Don’t you think they’ll be loyal to her, since she gave birth to them?’ ‘The children will go to their true mother—you,’ said Brave Orchid. ‘That’s the way it is with mothers and children.‘”

“We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine.”

“There is no pain you can inflict that I cannot endure.”

“Together my parents sang what they had written, then let me rest.”

“In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.”