Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.

The rose and thorn, the treasure and dragon, joy and sorrow, all mingle into one.

The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

There must be a positive and negative in everything in the universe in order to complete a circuit or circle, without which there would be no activity, no motion.

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

The Cube is, at the same time, a symbol of simplicity and complexity.

I'm fascinated by the yin and yang of everything.

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.

There's light and dark in all things, you know?

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.

One who loves must learn fear. One who fears must learn love. The thinker must do. The doer must think. The pacifist must fight, the fighter must find peace. If you flow as a river, burn as a fire. If you burn as a furnace, flow as a river. If you fly as a bird, sit firm as a rock. If you sit firmly, then fly as a bird. Be a fire that flows. A rock that flies. Love with fear and fear with love. For we are not fire, not water, not air, not rocks, not thoughts, not deeds, not fear, not love. We are G-dly beings.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.

Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light.