Quotes About Amy Tan

#1. 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

#2. Ridley Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry-a band that, according to Barry, "plays music as well as Metallica writes novels".

Otto Penzler

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Amy Tan

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Amy Tan

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

Amy Tan

#13. 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

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

Amy Tan

#15. [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

#16. 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

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

Amy Tan

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Amy Tan

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Amy Tan

#27. 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

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

Amy Tan

#29. 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

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

Amy Tan

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#37. 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

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

Amy Tan

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Chaos is the penance for leisure.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#43. 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

#44. Japanese chase-away juice." And

Amy Tan

#45. 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

#46. 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

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

Amy Tan

#48. 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

#49. 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

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

Amy Tan

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#55. Libraries are the pride of the city.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#57. You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'

Amy Tan

#58. in a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family

Amy Tan

#59. 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

#60. The things one had to do in life sometimes had nothing to do with what was fun or convenient.

Amy Tan

#61. And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.

Amy Tan

#62. 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

#63. Suffer more now, suffer less later.

Amy Tan

#64. I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#66. We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

Amy Tan

#67. The life we receive is not always what we choose.

Amy Tan

#68. 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

#69. Turn around then and lean against that boulder with your bottom facing me. I'll enter you from behind. Are you damp yet?" In

Amy Tan

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. Hugging and being hugged by everybody in moments of sadness and triumph, because hugging is something that never came naturally to me, and now it does.

Amy Tan

#73. 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

#74. If you asked me how I felt when they told me I would marry Wen Fu, I can say only this: It was like being told I had won a big prize. And it was also like being told my head was going to be chopped off. Something between those two feelings.

Amy Tan

#75. This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate.

Amy Tan

#76. Never show a weapon before you have to use it

Amy Tan

#77. I'm not saying fate happens without blame. but when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.

Amy Tan

#78. you showed me who I truly am. You did not remove my doubts. You forced me to see how I waver.

Amy Tan

#79. Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.

Amy Tan

#80. We listened patiently to Lester, words skittering out of his mouth like cartoon dogs on fresh-waxed linoleum, frantically going nowhere.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#82. And I'd let him- not because I weakened and wanted sex, but because it would have been spiteful, beyond redemption, not to allow us this hope.

Amy Tan

#83. I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#85. Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.

Amy Tan

#86. That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.

Amy Tan

#87. I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read - which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I'm told my books are on required reading lists.

Amy Tan

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.

Amy Tan

#91. He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

Amy Tan

#92. glowered, and she returned

Amy Tan

#93. Fate changes when you change your clothes.

Amy Tan

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

Amy Tan

#95. he kissed me with earnestness, banging his lips against my teeth and covering me with saliva from nose to chin.

Amy Tan

#96. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown.

Amy Tan

#97. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

Amy Tan

#98. 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

#99. It felt like all the truth got whitewashed with fake happiness," she said, "only it was not happy and it was worse than fake. It was dangerous

Amy Tan

#100. There was never the right time for me to declare we should be together for the rest of our lives when you were yelling at me that you would never sleep in the same bed as me again.

Amy Tan