Maxine Hong Kingston

You can't eat straight A's.

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.

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

Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don__ 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.

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.

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__ Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

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.

To me success means effectiveness in the world that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world-that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft

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.

In a time of destruction, create something.

You're too young to decide to live forever.

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.