Kingston Quotes

In a time of destruction, create something.

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

This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

You can't eat straight A's.

If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing...

You're too young to decide to live forever.

We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.

Girls can be so petty and jealous. I swear they're worse than guys sometimes. Except they're all quiet about it. They sugarcoat it or else they talk behind each other's backs. It's seriously twisted.

Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

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.

Hunger also changes the world—when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.

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.

She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.

To the Hesitating Purchaser: "If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons And Buccaneers and buried Gold And all the old romance, retold, Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of to-day: -So be it, and fall on! If not, If studious youth no longer crave, His ancient appetites forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, Or Cooper of the wood and wave: So be it, also! And may I And all my pirates share the grave, Where these and their creations lie!

Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.

My place beside you. My blood for yours. Till the Green Ember rises, or the end of the world!

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.

Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.

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

I don’t like you, Kingston.” “That’s okay. You’re not my type.

Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?” I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.” “I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. “And I’m not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks.” “What’s an acid flashback?” Izzy crows. “Nothing,” my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me.

I received a voicemail from my grandmother that said "I'm coming to visit, dear. Don't bother locking the doors." Today is the second anniversary of her death.

I awoke in a hospital bed, surrounded by loved ones. Their smiles slowly turned to malicious grins as they said in unison, "You shouldn't have woken up.

The attic in my mother's house was always off-limits. When I finally couldn't resist exploring it, I found a dusty photo album filled with pictures of my funeral.

The fortune teller gazed into my eyes and whispered, "Your deepest desire will come true tonight." When I came home, I found my wife's dead body lying in her own blood.

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.

I heard my step daughter's voice calling for help from the basement, in the middle of the night. I rushed down, only to remember that I had pushed her down the stairs to her death, the night before.

Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

Laying awake on my childhood bed, I heard the closet door open. I never realized the monster inside was real until it whispered, “I’ve been waiting for you.

The scratching at the door persisted. but I was too afraid to let my cat in. He had been dead for a week.

My daughter kept saying there was a monster under her bed. I sniggered and looked, only to find my daughter hiding, terrified, under the bed.

I started receiving text messages from my best friend, who died three years ago. The last message read, "Hurry up, I'm waiting for you outside.

But here's the thing--no matter how many possessions you have, you never feel secure. As soon as you get one thing, there is always something else you "need".

Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.

…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –Maxine Hong Kingston

My daughter described her imaginary friend Lily as a girl who was always covered in blood. Lily is the name of the little girl who died in an accidental hit-and-run I was responsible for.

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.

The doctor pronounced me dead and sent me for an autopsy. I could still feel every incision when they started operating on me

He woke up to the sound of weeping in his ear. When he opened his eyes, he saw his own lifeless body hovering above him.

You have your mother's eyes!" my grandmother gasped. She couldn't bear the sight of my mother's gouged eyes laying lifeless in my palms.

She woke up the faint sound of scratching beneath her bed. It was the last thing she heard before icy fingers wrapped around her ankle and dragged her into the darkness.

The end comes to all of us...but the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own, then in what way is it living?

We may find pleasure in our duty, but our duty is not our own pleasure.

I’ve been anonymously sending her gifts every day. Each package contains a piece of her boyfriend’s severed body parts.

A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.

...it's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.

As the therapist listened to her patient's deepest fears and insecurities, she couldn't shake the feeling that they were somehow reflecting her own dark thoughts. When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she realized she had been alone in her office the whole time.

The territorialism and desire to possess things comes directly from the ego, which strives to own and control things. Your spirit already knows you own nothing. It is a matter of realizing that your happiness does not depend on your ownership of things. They help you in your journey but they are not the journey itself.

So many people have the TV or radio constantly turned on "for company," or spend their time reading trashy novels, aimlessly surfing the Net, and so on. Then suddenly one day you are old or sick and you realize you have done nothing with your life. All your thoughts are other people's thoughts and you have no idea who you really are or what the purpose of your life might be.

He laughed, and I caught my breath at the sound. I wished I was funny, just to hear him laugh again.

But at the beginning of the night anything's possible.

He wasn’t looking for a soulmate. That would require having a soul to share, and he’d sold his off long ago

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

Her husband's sleepwalking had always been a source of amusement for her. It was no longer amusing when one night she woke up to find him standing at the edge of their bed in his sleepwalking state, holding a knife and whispering, "You're next”.

Upon Good Earth, lay the body down, open the mouth wide, let song rush through.

I am afraid... But I keep on loving what's on the other side of this fight, and that will have to make me brave.

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. (1983: 61)

Because joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

Why cry and possibly make someone around you upset when you can smile and maybe make someone around you happy?

Being a ruler is, contrary to popular notions, a calling of self-sacrifice. That is, if one wants to be a good ruler.

Because every man who fight monster become a monster too, and there be at least one woman in Kingston who think me is the killer of all things name hope.

Think twice before you buy. Decide before you purchase anything where you are going to keep it and what you are going to use it for. If your answers to either of these questions are vague, then you are about to purchase clutter. Desist from buying.

He sighed. 'Your life is your own,Miss Kingston. We have only one. Don't allow anyone else to dictate to you what you should do with yours.' She blinked and frowned as if she didn't understand what he meant. 'It's yours,' he advised softly. 'Don't waste it on petty conventions or conformity. Swim against the tide if you want to.

There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.

You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.

I was speaking well because I was talking to her; there are people who dry up language.

When you live surrounded by clutter, it is impossible to have clarity about what you are doing in your life.

I'm going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. There's nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I'm smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I've already applied. I'm smart. I can do all sorts of things. I know how to get A's, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself. So you don't have to find me a keeper who's too dumb to know a bad bargain. I'm so smart, if they say write ten pages, I can write fifteen. I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everyone thinks I'm nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. Even if I am stupid and talk funny amd get sick, I won't let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I'm getting out of here. I can't stand living here anyore. It's your fault I talk weird.

In those sticky summer nights in South London our windows stay open and our tiny apartment becomes our secret garden. The magic of the secret garden is that it exists in our imagination. There are no limits, no borderlines. The secret garden leads to the marigolds of Mogadishu and the magnolias of Kingston and when the heat turns us sticky and sweet and unwilling to be claimed by defeat we own the night. We own our bodies. We own our lives.

If you should decide during your old age that you would like to live another five hundred years, come here and drink ten pounds of this sap,” they told me. “But don’t do it now. You’re too young to decide to live forever.

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

Things change after you die, though- I guess because dying is about the lonliest thing you can do.

What the hell are you doing with my underwear?” He kept his response flippant. “I don’t have this color in my collection.

My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the field and eats food left for the gods.

The other important thing to understand is that as humans we see only a segment of reality in the greater cosmic scheme of things, so we are really never in a position to judge anyone or anything.

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. Then I get bitter: no one supports me.

West's haunted gaze returned to Phoebe's figure in the portrait. "I don't deserve her," he mumbled, without intending to. "Of course you don't. Neither do I deserve my wife. It's an unfair fact of life that the worst men end up with the best women.

So we went to the high-level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going to Kingston.  He said he couldn’t say for certain of course, but that he rather thought he was.  Anyhow, if he wasn’t the 11.5 for Kingston, he said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the 10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction, and we should all know when we got there.  We slipped half-a-crown into his hand, and begged him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.

Jax steps away from me. “Learn to let go of whatever’s haunting you. You don’t want to become like me, ruining anything good in your life. Unfortunately, people like me don’t get a big happy ending. But you deserve it all. The dancing in the rain finale with some lovesick twat who can give you the best of him for the rest of your long lives.” He walks back to his room, leaving me in a mess of my own emotions. Jax Kingston stole a piece of my heart, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get it back. And worse, I don’t know if I want it.

Should” is one of the most disempowering words there is. When you use it, you feel guilty and obligated. My advice is to dump the word from your vocabulary forever. Use “could,” not “should,” from here on in.

Your body is the temporary temple of your Spirit. What you keep around you in the extended temple of your home needs to change as you change and grow, so that it reflects who you are. Particularly if you are engaged in any kind of self-improvement work, you need to update your environment regularly. So get into the habit of leaving a trail of discarded clutter in your wake, and start to think of it as a sign of your progression!

Sebastian, the Duke of Kingston, radiated the cool confidence of a man who had been born to privilege. Unlike most British peers, who were disappointingly average, Kingston was dashing and ungodly handsome, with the taut, slim physique pf a man half his age. Known for his shrewd mind and caustic wit, he oversaw a labyrinthine financial empire that included, of all things, a gentlemen's gaming club. If his fellow noblemen expressed private distaste for the vulgarity of owning such an enterprise, none dared criticize him publicly. He was the holder of too many debts, the possessor of too many ruinous secrets. With a few words or strokes of a pen, Kingston could have reduced nearly any proud aristocratic scion to beggary. Unexpectedly, rather sweetly, the duke seemed more than little enamored of his own wife. One of his hands lingered idly at the small of her back, his enjoyment in touching her covert but unmistakable. One could hardly blame him. Evangeline, the duchess, was a spectacularly voluptuous woman with apricot-red hair, and merry blue eyes set in a lightly freckled complexion. She looked warm and radiant, as if she'd been steeped in a long autumn sunset.

Even after three decades of marriage, Evie's heart still skipped a beat at the sight of her husband, formerly Lord St. Vincent, now the Duke of Kingston. Sebastian had matured into a magnificent man with a presence that both intimidated and dazzled. Since ascending to the dukedom ten years ago, he had acquired a veneer of dignity that befitted a man of his considerable power. But no one could look into those remarkable blue eyes, alive with glints of fire and ice, without recalling that he had once been the most wicked rake in England. He still was- Evie could attest to that. Time had treated Sebastian lovingly, and always would. He was a beautiful man, lean and elegant, his tawny-golden hair now lightly brushed with silver at the temples. A lion in winter, whom no one could cross except at their peril. Maturity had given him a look of cool, incisive authority, the sense of a man who had seen and experienced enough that he could rarely, if ever, be outmaneuvered. But when something amused or touched him, his smile was both incandescent and irresistible.

Here's the thing. No matter how many possessions you have, you never feel secure. As soon as you get one thing, there's always something else you "need". And also, you have the added problem of worrying about losing the stuff you already have. Some of the most insecure people I know are multimillionaires. True security can only come from knowing who you are and what you are here to do.

Trong thời đại của sự hủy diệt, hãy tạo ra một điều gì đó. Một bài thơ. Một cuộc diễu hành. Một tình bạn. Một cộng đồng. Một địa điểm thuộc về tài sản chung. Một ngôi trường. Một lời hứa. Một nguyên tắc đạo đức. Một khoảnh khắc yên bình.

La tournée terminée, Tom et Roger pensèrent qu'après le succès de I Shot The Sheriff, ce serait bien de descendre dans les Caraïbes pour continuer sur le thème du reggae. Ils organisèrent un voyage en Jamaïque, où ils jugeaient qu'on pourrait fouiner un peu et puiser dans l'influence roots avant d'enregistrer. Tom croyait fermement au bienfait d'exploiter cette source, et je n'avais rien contre puisque ça voulait dire que Pattie et moi aurions une sorte de lune de miel. Kingston était une ville où il était fantastique de travailler. On entendant de la musique partout où on allait. Tout le monde chantait tout le temps, même les femmes de ménage à l'hotel. Ce rythme me rentrait vraiment dans le sang, mais enregistrer avec les Jamaïcains était une autre paire de manches. Je ne pouvais vraiment pas tenir le rythme de leur consommation de ganja, qui était énorme. Si j'avais essayé de fumer autant ou aussi souvent, je serais tombé dans les pommes ou j'aurais eu des hallucinations. On travaillait aux Dynamic Sound Studios à Kingston. Des gens y entraient et sortaient sans arrêt, tirant sur d'énormes joints en forme de trompette, au point qu'il y avait tant de fumée dans la salle que je ne voyais pas qui était là ou pas. On composait deux chansons avec Peter Tosh qui, affalé sur une chaise, avait l'air inconscient la plupart du temps. Puis, soudain, il se levait et interprétait brillamment son rythme reggae à la pédale wah-wah, le temps d'une piste, puis retombait dans sa transe à la seconde où on s'arrêtait.

There is no singular meaning of wife. That is the point. That is its meaning. To see the wife fully through a multi-faceted lens is one of the central challenges facing society in the twenty-first century. To do this, new scripts are required that employ wife as a verb and as a gender-neutral concept. These are essential if we are to create necessary new narratives, new ways of living as women and men together.

In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans. Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outfits, a different one for each photograph that he sent from America. (1983: 59)

I hear you will bring in a law,’ Kingston says. ‘It seems harsh, to make them commit a crime in retrospect.’ They try to explain it to the constable. A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past, just for being over and done. He can’t say, ‘all water under the bridges’; the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often, meaning is only revealed retrospectively. The will of God, for instance, is brought to light these days by more skilful translators. As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up. ‘Bear in mind his Majesty’s remarkable foresight, at the trial of the late queen. He knew the sentence before the verdict was in.’ ‘True,’ Kingston says. ‘The executioner was already on the sea.’ Kingston has been a councillor long enough. He should know how the king’s mind works. Once Henry says, ‘This is my wish,’ it becomes so dear and familiar a wish that he thinks he has always had it. He names his need, and he wants it supplied.

Many of the old houses, round about, speak very plainly of those days when Kingston was a royal borough, and nobles and courtiers lived there, near their King, and the long road to the palace gates was gay all day with clanking steel and prancing palfreys, and rustling silks and velvets, and fair faces.  The large and spacious houses, with their oriel, latticed windows, their huge fireplaces, and their gabled roofs, breathe of the days of hose and doublet, of pearl-embroidered stomachers, and complicated oaths.  They were upraised in the days “when men knew how to build.”  The hard red bricks have only grown more firmly set with time, and their oak stairs do not creak and grunt when you try to go down them quietly. Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved oak staircase in one of the houses in Kingston.  It is a shop now, in the market-place, but it was evidently once the mansion of some great personage.  A friend of mine, who lives at Kingston, went in there to buy a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless moment, put his hand in his pocket and paid for it then and there.

Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes....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.

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.

As he lifted his head, he saw a painting on the wall, in a carved and gilded frame. It was a luminous portrait of the Duchess with her children when they were still young. The group was arranged on the settee, with Ivo, still an infant, on his mother's lap. Gabriel, Raphael, and Seraphina were seated on either side of her, while Phoebe leaned over the back of the settee. Her face was close to her mother's, her expression tender and slightly mischievous, as if she were about to tell her a secret or make her laugh.

Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants - always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor's not swept, the ironing's not ready, the money's not made. I would be still young if we lived in China. (1983: 98)

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man . . .” Evie chanted as she played with Stephen in the Challons’ private railway carriage. They occupied one side of a deep upholstered settee, with Sebastian lounging in the other corner. The baby clapped his tiny hands along with his grandmother, his rapt gaze fastened on her face. “Make me a cake as fast as you can . . .” The nursery rhyme concluded, and Evie cheerfully began again. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” “My sweet,” Sebastian interrupted, “we’ve been involved in the manufacture of cakes ever since we set foot on the train. For my sanity, I beg you to choose another game.” “Stephen,” Evie asked her grandson, “do you want to play peekaboo?” “No,” came the baby’s grave answer. “Do you want to play ‘beckoning the chickens?’” “No.” Evie’s impish gaze flickered to her husband before she asked the child, “Do you want to play horsie with Gramps?” “Yes!” Sebastian grinned ruefully and reached for the boy. “I knew I should have kept quiet.” He sat Stephen on his knee and began to bounce him, making him squeal with delight.

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

What are you going to do for a living? Yea, you're going to have to work because you can't be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair. You've got to let people know you have a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life? You think you'll always have your big sister? You think somebody's going to marry you, is that it? Well you're not the type that gets dates, let alone gets married. Nobody's going to notice you. And you have to talk for interviews, speak right up in front of the boss. Don't you know that?

Justin's small form was very still with excitement, his attention riveted on the black feline. "Look, Mama!" Phoebe glanced at Mr. Ravenel. "Is she feral?" "No, but she's undomesticated. We keep a few barn cats to reduce the rodent and insect population." "Can I pet her?" Justin asked. "You could try," Mr. Ravenel said, "but she won't come close enough. Barn cats prefer to keep their distance from people." His brows lifted as the small black cat made her way to Sebastian and curled around his leg, arching and purring. "With the apparent exception of dukes. My God, she's a snob." Sebastian lowered to his haunches. "Come here, Justin," he murmured, gently kneading the cat along its spine to the base of its tail. The child approached with his small hand outstretched. "Softly," Sebastian cautioned. "Smooth her fur the same way it grows." Justin stroked the cat carefully, his eyes growing round as her purring grew even louder. "How does she make that sound?" "No one has yet found a satisfactory explanation," Sebastian replied. "Personally, I hope they never do." "Why, Gramps?" Sebastian smiled into the small face so close to his. "Sometimes the mystery is more delightful than the answer.