{"author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston","total_quotes":13,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["success"],"id":29071,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["hawaii","immensity","joy","ocean","oceans","sea","southern","wonder"],"id":50082,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["inspirational","motivational","work"],"id":102810,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["books","reading"],"id":211304,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["asian-american","assimiliation","culture","culture-identity","emigrants","immigrants"],"id":227660,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"You can't eat straight A's.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["expectations","poverty","school"],"id":266595,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"You're too young to decide to live forever.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["inspirational","philosophy-of-life"],"id":275411,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["darkness","snow","space"],"id":289663,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["chinese-american","feminine-identity","feminism"],"id":332530,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"},{"text":"In a time of destruction, create something.","author":"Maxine Hong Kingston","tags":["creation","destruction","hope","life"],"id":373284,"author_id":"Maxine+Hong+Kingston"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":13,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}