Maxine Quotes

In a time of destruction, create something.

Cherish your wilderness.

It's been said that love finds you when you're ready.

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.

You can call me Agent Mickelson,' he told me with a smile. 'What about you? Is Max short for something? Maxine?' 'No, Dean. It's just Max.

Maxine makes me read her Indian stuff that I don’t always get. I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore.

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.

Here’s what I believe: 1. If you are offended or hurt when you hear Hillary Clinton or Maxine Waters called bitch, whore, or the c-word, you should be equally offended and hurt when you hear those same words used to describe Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, or Theresa May. 2. If you felt belittled when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” then you should have felt equally concerned when Eric Trump said “Democrats aren’t even human.” 3. When the president of the United States calls women dogs or talks about grabbing pussy, we should get chills down our spine and resistance flowing through our veins. When people call the president of the United States a pig, we should reject that language regardless of our politics and demand discourse that doesn’t make people subhuman. 4. When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, “Is this an attempt to reduce someone’s humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rights?” 5. If you’re offended by a meme of Trump Photoshopped to look like Hitler, then you shouldn’t have Obama Photoshopped to look like the Joker on your Facebook feed. There is a line. It’s etched from dignity. And raging, fearful people from the right and left are crossing it at unprecedented rates every single day. We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.

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.

I don't believe in making war with food. Food is not the enemy. Said by Claire in The 5th Horseman

Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self lay lightly down, and slept.

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

Any messages for me?" Usually I got one or two, but mostly people who wanted my help preferred to talk in person. "Yes. Hold on." She pulled out a handful of pink tickets and recited from memory, without checking the paper. "Seven forty-two a.m., Mr. Gasparian: I curse you. I curse your arms so they wither and die and fall off your body. I curse your eyeballs to explode. I curse your feet to swell until blue. I curse your spine to crack. I curse you. I curse you. I curse you.

Wipe your mouth, there's still a tiny bit of bullshit around your lips.

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.

Our product is still totally DeepArcher?” “Which is…” “Like ‘departure’, only you pronounce it DeepArcher?” “Zen thing,” Maxine guesses. “Weed thing.

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

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

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.

Its been said that love finds you when you're ready," Lindsey Boxer in 4th of July.

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 am what I am not yet.

What is more likely? That tomorrow will be called 'Thursday' or that Maxine Waters will play the race card in her ethics investigation?

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

It’s funny,” she said reflectively, “but I always used to think that if only I was slimmer everything in my life would be all right. I didn’t realize until it happened that it would just open up a whole new set of problems.” ~Maxine

Everybody has a soul." I turn to Pelly. "And that means you, too." "I'm not so sure of that," he says. "What does it feel like?" "Having a soul?" I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. "I don't know," I tell Pelly. "I don't have anything to compare it to- you know, what not having a sould would feel like." We fall into a kind of awkward silence. I don't know about the others, but I'm working on what a soul is and not coming up with a whole lot. I mean, I just always thought of it as me- what I feel like being me. But surely Pelly feels like himself, so that means he's got a soul right? But if that's not your soul, then what is? It's weird and not something you really think about, is it?

Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

Maxine,” Grant said, but I barely heard him. I was lost in that vision, in those emotions—the pain, and hunger for pain, forming the root of so much agonized rage. “ ‘Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate,’” I muttered. “Yoda, from Star Wars?” “ ‘Hate leads to suffering.’” I met his gaze. “Yoda knows his shit, man.” Grant’s mouth crooked in a gentle smile.

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

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.

I cant help but notice that you are not wearing a wedding ring, dear lady. Are you, by any chance, looking for a husband?' He smiled eagerly, his drenched hat clinging to his round head. Looking for a husband? Why?' Grandma Maxine asked. 'Did I lose one?

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.

Any of those priests even sniff at you wrong, you fuck them over until they see Jesus.

What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?

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.)

Romance is everything to turn it into a cause for given is priceless

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

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.

Life will do anything for a living.

If each day is a gift, I'd like to know where to return Mondays!

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

Our Parents were gods and monsters at the same time. Maybe we're all like that- gods and monsters

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

If you are a dream, then it is one from which I do not ever wish to be woken.

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.

I learned to stay quiet. I learned that nobody much cared. I learned that it was probably my fault anyway, and that what they were doing to me was perfectly okay. This is how it alters us. This is how we change.

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.

I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry.

Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant's allergy to real folding money

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 row ostensibly has to do with tables versus CSS, a controversial issue of the time, which has always, given its level of passion, struck Maxine as somehow religious. She imagines it will be difficult, no matter which side prevails, to appreciate, ten years from now, the all-consuming nature of the dispute.

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.

Can you hear me, Todd? There’s an ambulance on its way.” For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. “It’s Maxine,” she said. “Remember me?

In this country, you look at a person, and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilisations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It's taken some getting used to but now Asanka likes it - this casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear.

Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape a table to enclose the sitter at it, trapping him like a baby in a high chair or a school boy at his inkwell.

Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself.

I knew without doubt that my mother’s death had irrevocably altered who I was and who I would become. When a parent dies young, explains Maxine Harris, PhD, in The Loss That Is Forever, children have a personal encounter with death that influences the way they see the world for the rest of their lives. “Some events are so big and so powerful that they cannot help but change everything they touch,” she writes. How could all my thoughts and feelings, then, not be traced back to the event that had created such a jagged fault line through my history, dividing it into a permanent Before and After?

By today’s standards, if you go by the early morning TV misery shows, my broken home family of mixed parentage siblings was quite normal.

Always remember we are under the same sky, looking at the same moon.

And I had to get out of hating range.

Indoors, the evening gets you’d say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it’s anybody’s business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter’s clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win. “Yes!” Horst beginning to scream in delighted disbelief. “And it better be Keanu Reeves in the biopic!

A lot of talk inside about feelings. How feelings are like visitors with something to give you. If they knock on your door: answer. Let em in. Accept the gift. Say cheers, mate. Otherwise, they said, the feeling will go away and you won't get the gift. I disagree. If a feeling knocks and no one answers, it'll get p[EXPLICIT]d off. It'll kick the door in, chuck the gift at you and smash your best ornaments so you don't disrespect it again. You'll be clearing up a lot more mess than you had to start with. So it's good, Maxine, to cry if you want. Remember that.

It’s still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonisers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There’s already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web –” “Is that,” Maxine wonders, “like, ‘Ride the Wild Surf’?” “Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything’ll be suburbanised faster than you can say ‘late capitalism.’ Then it’ll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they’ll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom’ll have to saddle up and head somewhere else.

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.

Maxine will sometimes compliment us on our hair or other aspects of our scruffy appearance. The next day, or even later the same day, she'll send an all-caps e-mail asking why a certain form is not on her desk. This will prompt a peppy reply, one barely stifling a howl of fear: Hey Maxine! The document you want was actually put in your in-box yesterday around lunchtime. I also e-mailed it to you and Russell. Let me know if you can't find it! Thanks! Laars P.S. I'm also attaching it again as a Word doc, just in case. There's so much wrong here: the fake-vague around lunchtime, the nonsensical Thanks, the quasi-casual postscript. The exclamation points look downright psychotic.

When forces of nature are involved, fate gets all the blame.

‎"To choose is to age." Who said that? Who cares? I pictured myself taking a right, then a left, then a right again.

Leeky Shortz says "Live life like your arse is on fire!

When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better

The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.

For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:

Mothers who love their children take them along.

It’s easy when people clean up after you. Ted

Grace just is. Nobody can explain it, and it's not something you can deserve. Whether you recognize it or not, whether you feel grateful for it or not, it just is. Guilty or innocent, condemned or redeemed, when you think that you can't go on, and when you think you've already gone on, grace is wider and deeper than you think, and it can change far more that you ever imagined. There is no place where anything begins or ends, but by grace, everything comes in it's time.

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)

Matthew shook his head. “Whoever said anything of women in the Victorian era being prim and proper apparently hadn’t met Maxine Fleming.” Tahatan chuckled. “I’m sure a publisher somewhere would make a nice fortune with putting this into print. The fact is, people tend to look back on bygone times through rose-colored glasses. All eras have encouraged values that are pushed on the surface, but in the end, people are still people.

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.

As they walked back to the laundry, Brave Orchid showed her sister where to buy the various groceries and how to avoid Skid Row. "On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days." On weak days you notice bodies on the sidewalk, and you are visible to Panhandler Ghosts and Mugger Ghosts.

My hands scrabbled in a wide, frantic arc and touched something hard and round. Wood. I pulled myself forward a few inches, grasped it and, afraid to look, felt above it to a firm, cloth-covered surface. It was a chair. I forced my eyes open. I

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.

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)

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.

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.

Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits.

Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching Scooby Goes Latin! (1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial. “Hi, Mom.” She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.

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?

متى يُنتظر أن يضرب النيزك الضخم الأرض؟- سمعت كلاما عن 2035- قصدك أن العالم قد ينتهى- خلال سبعة وثلاثين عاما؟ لن ينتهى العالم- إذا ضرب الأرض نيزك بهذا الحجم، فسوف نتحطم- ربما نتحطم نحن، ويبقى العالم موجودا مع هذا- قصدك الكون؟- أظن ذلك ما أقصد- كيف يكون للكون وجود- إذا لم نكن نحن موجودين لنصوغ المفهوم؟ هل تظنينا من الأهمية بحيث لا يمكن للكون- أن يوجد من دون أن نوجد؟ ماذا كان هنا إذن قبل أن نولد؟ التاريخ كان هنا- بالضبط. نحن ببساطة جزء منه- مثل ثنية فى ساق شجرة لمَ لم تقل مثل حبة رمل على شط- خلاص، حبة رمل على شط- كيف يقتنع واحد مثلك يعرف الكثير- عن الكون باستخدام كليشيه؟ الموت نفسه كليشيه- ما قصدك؟- هو معطى لنا. وليس بوسعنا تغييره- لكن أنت تقول، أن موتنا نفسه غير مهم- لا الآن ولا خلال ثلاثين سنة، ولا حين يتحطم الكون بالضبط- طيب، ماذا نفعل؟- فى ماذا؟- ماذا نفعل لنحول بين النيزك وتحطيمنا؟- أظن أننا نستطيع اعتراضه- من؟ أنا وأنت؟- الحكومة- كنت عارفة- عارفة ماذا؟- أنك أشبه بقاتل مأجور- ما قصدك؟- أنت مستأجر من الحكومة لتحملنى على - الإعتقاد بأننى غير مهمة، حتى لو مت وكيف لهذا أن يجعلنى قاتلا؟- نظريا، أنت تكشطنى بأفكارك.- ربما هكذا أكون أقرب لفنان منى إلى قاتل- كم يدفعون لك؟- من؟- الحكومة- ولمَ تستأجرنى الحكومة لإقناعكِ بأى شىء؟- هل لأى منا هذه الأهمية؟ ها انت تعود من جديد.- أنت فقط لا تريد أن تعترف أعترف بماذا؟- بأن الكون سيفنى حين نموت- ماشى. حين نموت سيفنى الكون- مرتاحة هكذا؟ نعم، مؤقتا-

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful'... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92). --For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts

As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.” “Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!” “You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.

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.