‘The Woman Warrior’ is a popular book written by Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese American author.
The story is told through the eyes of five women, including Kingston’s mother and aunt, as well as a mythical female warrior called Fa Mu Lan.
I have selected some of the most popular quotes from The Woman Warrior novel for you.
Table of Contents
The Woman Warrior Quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston
“When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“Mothers who love their children take them along.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“The day was a great eye, and it was not paying much attention to me now.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“But the men – hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil – had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“You can’t eat straight A’s.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
Other Great Book Quotes: The Myth of Sisyphus Quotes by Albert Camus and Paper Towns Quotes by John Green
Quotes from The Woman Warrior
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“Hunger also changes the world—when eating can’t be a habit, than neither can seeing.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. “Bad girl,” my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
Famous The Woman Warrior Quotes
“Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I’m not, I’m not retarded.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“If only I could let my mother know the list, she —and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“You’re too young to decide to live forever.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
Best The Woman Warrior Quotes
“For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“The whole world lived inside the gourd, the earth a green and blue pearl like the one the dragon plays with.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“Here they all were together, idle above their fields, nobody hoeing, godlike; nobody weeding, New Year’s in summer.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“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.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior).
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