When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.
Maxine Hong KingstonRead
Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Joy and life can only be experienced in the current moment, not in the past or future.
This quote by Maxine Hong Kingston emphasizes the importance of living in the moment. It suggests that true joy and the essence of life are found in our present experiences, rather than being tied to memories of the past or aspirations for the future. This perspective encourages mindfulness and embracing the current moment to fully appreciate life.
Themes
JoyLifePresentMindfulnessExperience
In practice
Example use cases
In a mindfulness workshop, when discussing the importance of being present.
More from Maxine Hong Kingston
All quotes βThere can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.
Maxine Hong KingstonRead
In a time of destruction, create something.
Maxine Hong KingstonRead
We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.
Maxine Hong KingstonRead
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
Maxine Hong KingstonRead
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 KingstonRead
Similar quotes
Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass - -a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited.
Stephen DobynsRead
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mary KarrRead
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
Bill MoyersRead
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
Jonathan FranzenRead
We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
George SaundersRead
We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.
Maeve BinchyRead