Amy Tan's Quotes

#1. You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again.

Amy Tan

#2. There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying.
Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.

Amy Tan

#3. I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

Amy Tan

#4. How funny to see the foreigner in a farmer's work hat, like a fish that has put on clothes. Around

Amy Tan

#5. People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

Amy Tan

#6. When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he's thinking of pulling up roots.

Amy Tan

#7. But I don't have anything left inside of me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

Amy Tan

#8. You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

Amy Tan

#9. You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who's saved? Who's not?

Amy Tan

#10. Maybe all Americans who suffer from melancholy act as if they have gone mad. But I truly thought he might throw himself in the river, and I don't want his ghost visiting to keep telling me he's sorry.

Amy Tan

#11. He has always been politely indifferent. But what's the Chinese word that means indifferent because you can't see any differences?

Amy Tan

#12. 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

#13. He simply translated what was in LuLing's heart: her better intentions, her hopes.

Amy Tan

#14. 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

#15. Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

Amy Tan

#16. I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left ...

Amy Tan

#17. 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

#18. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he's just another bird drinking from your misery.

Amy Tan

#19. When you touch a man's nostalgia, he is yours.

Amy Tan

#20. Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.

Amy Tan

#21. There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.

Amy Tan

#22. Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.'
And now all she can do is watch it falling.

Amy Tan

#23. Libraries are the pride of the city.

Amy Tan

#24. While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.

Amy Tan

#25. Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only

Amy Tan

#26. Why did I need to see someone else's bad luck? To feel glad it was not mine? To scare myself into thinking it still might be?

Amy Tan

#27. But my father's faith, as I said, was absolute. Through God's prayer he could be granted exactly what he wanted.

Amy Tan

#28. In It's Only Temporary, Evan Handler confronts the ambiguities of life backward, forward, and in between. With hilarious honesty he reflects on the realization that we can start over again. It's Only Temporary is a heartfelt book for all of us who are getting younger and older at the same time.

Amy Tan

#29. 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

#30. I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

Amy Tan

#31. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.

Amy Tan

#32. 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

#33. Lack of clarity is a writer's truth.

Amy Tan

#34. I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale of relying on proof through fact.

Amy Tan

#35. 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

#36. Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.

Amy Tan

#37. My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.

Amy Tan

#38. Being able to restrain my emotions isn't a great victory - it's the pitiful proof of lost love.

Amy Tan

#39. My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.

Amy Tan

#40. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy.

Amy Tan

#41. Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.

Amy Tan

#42. By my father's own handwritten definition: "Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.

Amy Tan

#43. As a precaution, Ruth had also gnawed over the worst possibilities - brain tumor, Alzheimer's, stroke - believing this would ensure that it was not these things. History had always proven that she worried for nothing.

Amy Tan

#44. 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

#45. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate.

Amy Tan

#46. I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

Amy Tan

#47. Do you know what morals are Violet? They're other people's rules. Do you know what a conscience is? Freedom to use your own intelligence to determine what is right or wrong. You possess that freedom and no one can remove it from you

Amy Tan

#48. Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

Amy Tan

#49. But how can anyone truly understand another's suffering unless he has felt the wound being made and the moment trust died?

Amy Tan

#50. My father put his life in God's hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen.

Amy Tan

#51. [Karen Lundegaard] was quite frail, debilitated by metastatic breast cancer, which she had long known she had but for which she had been unable to get adequate treatment because she lacked medical insurance. ("If you mention anything about me," she said, "tell people that.")

Amy Tan

#52. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.
-Lindo

Amy Tan

#53. I did not lose myself all at once.

Amy Tan

#54. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.
-Suyuan

Amy Tan

#55. But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.

Amy Tan

#56. I made out with a homeless guy by accident. I had no idea
he was really tan, he had no shoes on. I just thought it was, like, his thang, you know? I was like, 'He's probably in a band.

Amy Schumer

#57. You have to believe in its principles. Anything is possible, as long as it's for the good of the world. Make the exception. Live exceptionally. And if you can't do that, maybe we should consider whether you're right for the project. Think about it, then let's talk tomorrow.

Amy Tan

#58. 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

#59. It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

Amy Tan

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. I love my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature.

Amy Tan

#63. My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.

Amy Tan

#64. Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?

Amy Tan

#65. What use for? asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. You put something else on top, everything fall down.

Amy Tan

#66. I ask myself, How can I relax? How can I let go of everything that's happened? You need complete trust to do that.

Amy Tan

#67. How can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?

Amy Tan

#68. From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.

Amy Tan

#69. What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?

Amy Tan

#70. 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

#71. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Amy Tan

#72. I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promiise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing ... But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother.

Amy Tan

#73. 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

#74. It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

Amy Tan

#75. I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

Amy Tan

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. I resented the easy supposition of all's well that ends well.

Amy Tan

#79. Only Americans think they have rights," Magic Gourd said. "What laws of heaven give you more rights and allow you to keep them? They are words on paper written by men who make them up and claim them. One day they can blow away, just like that." She

Amy Tan

#80. Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess.
- Ch. 5

Amy Tan

#81. Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!

Amy Tan

#82. It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

Amy Tan

#83. If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.

Amy Tan

#84. Japanese chase-away juice." And

Amy Tan

#85. She didn't understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger.

Amy Tan

#86. I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.

Amy Tan

#87. Chaos is the penance for leisure.

Amy Tan

#88. The man looked hot in his jersey, sexy as hell in a pair of
jeans and goddamn mouth-watering in nothing but his tan. In a business suit? He looked utterly fuckable.

Amy Andrews

#89. If someone offers to take your burden, you need to know he is serious, not just being polite and kind. Polite and kind do not last.

Amy Tan

#90. old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history

Amy Tan

#91. 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

#92. Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.

Amy Tan

#93. That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.

Amy Tan

#94. Accept love when it is offered, Violet. Return love and not suspicion. Then you'll receive more. - Loyalty Tang

Amy Tan

#95. I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn't know what that was. I knew only what it wasn't.
The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

Amy Tan

#96. Over time, passion wanes, differences don't.

Amy Tan

#97. And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I'm cut loose, untethered, not belonging to anything or anybody.

Amy Tan

#98. How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.

Amy Tan

#99. Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

Amy Tan

#100. 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