Hawai'i One Summer Quotes

“How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawai'i One Summer

“Dialect is only a regional and personal voiceprint… You can easily separate structure and meaning from dialect, and still be dealing with sound, with music, with speech, with another’s Mind. Gertrude Stein perfectly mimicked the rhythms and structures of Baltimore Blacks in her story ‘Melanctha’ and she didn’t transcribe the dialect at all—that is, didn’t have to misspell a lot of words to get the work done. Nelson Algren has many many passages with no misspellings, but he catches the real flow of regional speech.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawai'i One Summer

“I tell them I “grade by quantity and not quality.” By writing a hundred pages per semester, they have to improve—and the writing will find its form.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawai'i One Summer