Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

Let us not curse the darkness. Let us kindle little lights.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.

Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy.

What I love best in life is new starts.

Filipinos don't wallow in what is miserable and ugly. They recycle the bad into things of beauty.

Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

Everything can change. You can always have hope.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

The past is lying in flames. The future will rise from the flames within our hearts.

When one door closes, another window opens.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

Change doesn't have to be hard, and healing doesn't have to hurt. Surely by now you know that every thing happens for a reason! There is something better awaiting you on the other side of this.

Creativity is the antidote to destruction.

Our destiny often looks like a fruit-tree in winter. Who would think from its pitiable aspect that those rigid boughs, those rough twigs could next spring again be green, bloom, and even bear fruit? Yet we hope it, we know it.

Even places that have been shrouded in darkness for billions of years can be illuminated. Even a stone from the bottom of a river can be used to produce fire. Our present sufferings, no matter how dark, have certainly not continued for billions of years--nor will they linger forever. The sun will definitely rise. In fact, its ascent has already begun.

The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something.

There's a fount about to stream, There's a light about to beam, There's a warmth about to glow, There's a flower about to blow; There's a midnight blackness changing Into gray; Men of thought and men of action, Clear the way.

There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.

I can't write the same book over and over again... let it go, once it's gone!