Top 100 Amy Tan Quotes
#1. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
Amy Tan
#2. When you lose your face ... , it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.
Amy Tan
#3. Shanghainese people are good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality, Shanghai personality becomes part of yours.
Amy Tan
#4. My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
Amy Tan
#5. It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Amy Tan
#6. I write because I know that one day I will die, and thus I should experience as many deliberate observations, careful thoughts, wild ideas, and deep emotions as I can before that day occurs.
Amy Tan
#7. I had thus learned to push down my feelings, to force myself to not care, to do nothing and let things happen, come what may.
Amy Tan
#8. Accept love when it is offered, Violet. Return love and not suspicion. Then you'll receive more. - Loyalty Tang
Amy Tan
#9. Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.
Amy Tan
#10. On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.
Amy Tan
#11. Look at that. There one family lives, kitchen is in China, bedroom is in Myanmar. In this way, this family eats in one country, sleeps in other. I think this house been standing there for many centuries, yes, long time, before anyone decided where one country stops, the other starts
Amy Tan
#12. I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.
Amy Tan
#13. I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.
Amy Tan
#14. Libraries are the pride of the city.
Amy Tan
#15. in a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family
Amy Tan
#16. The things one had to do in life sometimes had nothing to do with what was fun or convenient.
Amy Tan
#17. Suffer more now, suffer less later.
Amy Tan
#18. When you touch a man's nostalgia, he is yours.
Amy Tan
#19. The life we receive is not always what we choose.
Amy Tan
#20. And it's ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus's dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.
Amy Tan
#21. This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate.
Amy Tan
#22. Never show a weapon before you have to use it
Amy Tan
#23. you showed me who I truly am. You did not remove my doubts. You forced me to see how I waver.
Amy Tan
#24. Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.
Amy Tan
#25. We listened patiently to Lester, words skittering out of his mouth like cartoon dogs on fresh-waxed linoleum, frantically going nowhere.
Amy Tan
#26. I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Amy Tan
#27. When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it's all part of making sense of who I am.
Amy Tan
#28. I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.
Amy Tan
#29. glowered, and she returned
Amy Tan
#30. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown.
Amy Tan
#31. A good government had to guide its people, sometimes gently, sometimes strictly, just as parents did. It could allow certain freedoms, but in a style that suited the country.
Amy Tan
#32. A moment is not the same as time.
Amy Tan
#33. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.
-Ying Ying
Amy Tan
#34. Your only shame is to have shame.
Amy Tan
#35. A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end. I
Amy Tan
#36. Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
Amy Tan
#37. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
Amy Tan
#38. Hardships can harden even the best person.
Amy Tan
#39. These are the things I know are true ...
Amy Tan
#40. I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Amy Tan
#41. In this matter, you should not concern yourself for my sake.
Amy Tan
#42. When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he's thinking of pulling up roots.
Amy Tan
#43. Kiss, a pat on the rump, and a deep inhalation of my scent, as if he and I were dogs.
Amy Tan
#44. How funny to see the foreigner in a farmer's work hat, like a fish that has put on clothes. Around
Amy Tan
#45. I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Amy Tan
#46. I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity.
Amy Tan
#47. I AM A PERSON WHO THINKS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE SPIRIT WHEN I WRITE. I THINK ABOUT WHAT CAN'T BE KNOWN AND ONLY IMAGINED. I OFTEN SENSE A SPIRIT OR FORCE OR MEANING BEYOND MYSELF. I LEAVE IT OPEN AS TO WHAT THE SPIRIT IS, BUT I CONTINUE TO MAKE GUESSES.
Amy Tan
#48. what matters the most is a mix of strategy, cunning, honesty, patience, and the readiness to grab every opportunity. Above all, a girl must always be willing to do what is necessary. ACCIDENTS
Amy Tan
#49. Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.
Amy Tan
#50. You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort
Amy Tan
#51. The only thing certain in times of great uncertainty is that people will behave with great strength or weakness, and with very little else in between.
Amy Tan
#52. Isn't the past what people remember- who did what, how and why? And what the people remember, isn't that mostly what they've already chosen to believe?
Amy Tan
#53. I won't be what I'm not.
-Jing-mei
Amy Tan
#54. My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself perfectly in my memory.
Amy Tan
#55. In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother's story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth. After
Amy Tan
#56. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
Amy Tan
#57. Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.
Amy Tan
#58. People talk about this 'bucket list': 'I need to go to this country, I need to skydive.' Whereas I need to think as much as I can, to feel as much as I can, to be conscious and observe and understand me and the people around me as much as I can.
Amy Tan
#59. vampire hours of rest between dawn and noon.
Amy Tan
#60. Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?
Amy Tan
#61. I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
Amy Tan
#62. How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
Amy Tan
#63. My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
Amy Tan
#64. If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would nowhere else to go
Amy Tan
#65. What is a secret wish?" "It is what you want but cannot ask.
Amy Tan
#66. We were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.
Amy Tan
#67. I'm not consciously hiding anything.' After Ruth said that she wondered whether it was true. Then again, who revealed everything - the irritation, the fears? How tiresome that would be.
Amy Tan
#68. I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
Amy Tan
#69. I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
Amy Tan
#70. I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
Amy Tan
#71. My thinking is this: Her original mother, she did what she must. I, her in-between mother, I did what I must. That Japanese couple, they also did what they must. One day, this little girl will grow up, and she will be doing what she must. So you see, we all do what we must
Amy Tan
#72. Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.
Amy Tan
#73. I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Amy Tan
#74. bad, how likely is it to come
Amy Tan
#75. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.
Amy Tan
#76. They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.
Amy Tan
#77. My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.
Amy Tan
#78. this book. I will try to repay all of you with sustenance
Amy Tan
#79. Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.
Amy Tan
#80. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use.
Amy Tan
#81. Even when I worked in that world, I still wanted love so strong that the man would have no interest in another woman. Maybe you will always be incapable of giving that kind of love. You tell me I want too much. And maybe I do. But like you and your imagination, I can't help but be that way.
Amy Tan
#82. And when I say that is certainly true, that our marriage is over. I know what else she will say: "Then you must save it."
And even though I know it's hopeless- there's absolutely nothing left to save-I'm afraid if I tell her that, she'll still persuade me to try.
Amy Tan
#83. When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?
Amy Tan
#84. Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief.
Amy Tan
#85. Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
Amy Tan
#86. Life's always a big fucking compromise. You don't always get what you want, no matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how good you are. That's a myth. We're all hanging in the best way we can.
Amy Tan
#87. Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Amy Tan
#88. My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
Amy Tan
#89. I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations. - Two Kinds
Amy Tan
#90. Why does love end so quickly and hatred last without end?
Amy Tan
#91. You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.
Amy Tan
#92. Or maybe he would turn to religion. Many Americans did so when faced with heartache and hardship.
Amy Tan
#93. It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.
Amy Tan
#94. It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.
Amy Tan
#95. Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?
Amy Tan
#97. my room, and to rub his scent off me.
Amy Tan
#98. After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
Amy Tan
#99. Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
Amy Tan
#100. To keep false hopes is to prolong misery.
Amy Tan
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