Amy Tan Quotes

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

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

Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy.

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.'

But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me. -Lindo

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

American circumstances and Chiese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?
I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
She learned thse things, but I couldn't teach her Chinses character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.

this book. I will try to repay all of you with sustenance

Japanese chase-away juice." And

If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?

I would not want characters to come to my world. They'd lose their special qualities, the perfect amount of what I should know about them. On the other hand, I could go to theirs because they would not have any preconceptions of who I was. I'd like to hang out with the Cheshire cat, learn how to disappear, and speak in smart illogic. He would look exactly like his pen-and-ink illustration by Tenniel. I'd be rendered in pen and ink, too. That would be required for entering a pen-and-ink world with its particular dimensional strangeness.

And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over.
-Rose

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursuing.

That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.

In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations.

So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.

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

I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance I had carried around like my portable vanity with its broken mirror.

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

These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster.

When the anesthesia of love wears off,
you suffer the pain of consequence.

Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

In all these years we've been together," he said, "I don't think I know an important part of you. You keep secrets inside you. You hide. It's as though I've never seen you naked, and I've had to imagine what you look like behind the drapes."

"I'm not consciously hiding anything." After Ruth said that, she wondered whether it was true. Then again, who revealed everything - the irritations, the fears? How tiresome that would be. What did he mean by secrets?

"I want us to be intimate. I want to know what you want. Not just with us, but from life. What makes you happiest? Are you doing what you want to do?

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

just like my mother, and if I

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

The most perfect replica of the most perfect woman in all eternity.

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

If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming , no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming, she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.

Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods.

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

Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don't you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.

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

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.

Believe me, daughter, there is nothing worse than having your own family member out for revenge.

Writers by nature are subversive, observant, and discerning, and their voice contains that.

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.

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

So sad! This is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost?

If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

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.

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word ... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

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.

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

Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.

I want us to love each other so deeply we ache with the fullness of it.

All this talk of oblivion, of wanting nothing and becoming nobody, seems rather contradictory from a Buddhist sense. The Buddha did all this himself and he became so much a nobody that he became famous, the biggest nobody of them all. And he will never disappear, because fame has made him immortal. But I do admire him for his attitude and discipline. He was a good Indian son.

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.

A portrait,' she had said, 'should be that of a person who was breathing at the time it was painted.It should capture one of those breaths.

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.

It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable ... What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.

How can I argue with someone who makes no sense?

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.

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

Your only shame is to have shame.

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.

Suffer more now, suffer less later.

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before before I have a chance to know her better.

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

This is the kind of China you Americans always see in the movies - the poor countryside, people wearing big hats to protect themselves from the sun. No, I never wore a hat like that! I was from Shanghai. That's like thinking someone from San Francisco wears a cowboy hat and rides a horse. Ridiculous!

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.

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.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.'

Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.

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.

I was the daughter of my father's wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi , the spirit that caused me so much pain.
Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

A few times I invited Ba to visit me from the World of Yin. But other yin friends tell me he is stuck somewhere else, a foggy place where people believe their lies are true.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

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

It was sad and beautiful knowledge that a person cannot be found elsewhere but in his own spirit.

I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations. - Two Kinds

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

Even if I could live forever," she said to the baby, "I still don't know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason."
"But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well.

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.

bad, how likely is it to come

I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.

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

back as a mud-smashing

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.

I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that's true or not, I know the intention was there. Becasue when I want something to happen-or not happen- I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

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

A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end. I

Could you wrap your arms around me to keep me warm?

Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pissed in front of each other never happened. We don't use any of the baby talk, code words, or short hand gestures that had been our language of intimacy, the proof that we belonged to each other.

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.

We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.

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.

Or maybe he would turn to religion. Many Americans did so when faced with heartache and hardship.

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

Auntie An-mei had cried before she left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich and happy by communist standards. But when she got home, she cried to me that everyone had a palm out and she was the only one who left with an empty hand.

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.