Amy Tan Quotes

That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets. ~ Amy Tan

He saw all those private aspects of me - and I mean not just sexual private parts, but my darker side, my meanness, my pettiness, my self-loathing - all the things I kept hidden. So that with him I was completely naked, and when I was feeling the most vulnerable - when the wrong word would have sent me flying out the door forever - he always said exactly the right thing at the right moment. He didn't allow me to cover myself up. He would grab my hands, look me straight in the eye and tell me something new about why he loved me. ~ Amy Tan

Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
-An-mei ~ Amy Tan

Suffer more now, suffer less later. ~ Amy Tan

...I owed her a debt of gratitude. More than gratitude, much more.
I could finally see what had always been there. She had been more than an attendant, more than a friend, more than a sister. She had been a mother to me. She had worried, sought to protect me from danger, guided me toward the best. She had looked out for my future, assessed the worthiness of everyone to be in my life. And in that way, she had taken me as her purpose in life, the one who gave her meaning. I had a constant love all along. And in recognizing that, I felt moved to tears.
"How could you step out of my life?" I told her. "if you do don't join me, I will be lost. No one would worry about me as much as you. No one knows me better, knows my past and what this new life means. I should have told you a long time ago." I became teary-eyed. She kept her lips sealed, but her jaw was trembling. "You are the only loyal person in my life, the only one I can trust."
Tears fell from her eyes. "Now you know. I was always the only one."
"We love each other," I said with a light laugh. "In spite of all the trouble I've given you, you stayed with me. So it must be that you loved me like a mother. ~ Amy Tan

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

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

back as a mud-smashing ~ Amy Tan

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic. ~ Amy Tan

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

I now lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see it, they could not yank me out of it. ~ Amy Tan

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort ~ Amy Tan

The moving cliff gave us the feeling we had to look behind us to know what lay ahead. ~ Amy Tan

I was returning with myself whole and unbroken - limbs, mind, and spirit. I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance ~ Amy Tan

Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

Our meeting each other could not possibly be as random as two leaves from two trees being blown together. ~ Amy Tan

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

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice. ~ Amy Tan

I love my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature. ~ Amy Tan

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

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

When Jesus was born, he was already the son of God. I was the daughter of someone who ran away, a big disgrace. And when Jesus suffered, everyone worshipped him. Nobody worshipped me for living with Wen Fu. I was like that wife of Kitchen God. Nobody worshipped me either. He got all the excuses. He got all the credit. She was forgotten. ~ Amy Tan

A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. ~ Amy Tan

But he was so attuned to my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. HE had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had he'd pry away from me like little treasures. ~ Amy Tan

Could you wrap your arms around me to keep me warm? ~ Amy Tan

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

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. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

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

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. ~ Amy Tan

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. ~ Amy Tan

Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story. ~ Amy Tan

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. ~ Amy Tan

If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever.
-An-mei ~ Amy Tan

Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever. ~ Amy Tan

God, life changes faster than you think. ~ Amy Tan

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

To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself. ~ Amy Tan

As proof of her faith, my mother used to carry a samll leatherette Bible when she went to the First Chinese Baptist Church every Sunday. But later, after my mother lost her faith in God, that leatherette Bible would up wedged under a too-short table leg, a way for her to correct the imbalances of life. It's been there for over twenty years.
My mother pretends that Bible isn't there. Whenever anyone asks her what it's doing there, she says, a little too loudly, "Oh, this? I forgot." But I know she sees it. My mother is not the best housekeeper in the world, and after all these years that Bigle is still clean white...
My mother, she stills pay attention to it. That Bible under the table, I know she sees it. I remember seeing her write in it before she wedged it under.
I lift the table and slide the Bible out. I put the Bible on the table, flipping quickly through the pages, because I know it's there. On the page before the New Testament begins, there's a section called "Deaths," and that's where she wrote "Bing Hsu" lightly, in erasable pencil. ~ Amy Tan

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls ~ Amy Tan

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument. ~ Amy Tan

I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me. ~ 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. ~ Amy Tan

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

You can't stay in the dark for too long. Something inside you starts to fade, and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light. ~ Amy Tan

vampire hours of rest between dawn and noon. ~ Amy Tan

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

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

As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness ... ~ Amy Tan

Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today's struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone. ~ Amy Tan

I often reread passages of "Lolita" for its exquisite language. To me, "Lolita" has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life. ~ Amy Tan

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

I hope you don't suffer forever from keeping love from your heart ~ Amy Tan

Too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

Dementia was like a truth serum. ~ Amy Tan

Lack of clarity is a writer's truth. ~ Amy Tan

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

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? ~ Amy Tan

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

The life we receive is not always what we choose. ~ Amy Tan

I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. ~ Amy Tan

Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of. ~ Amy Tan

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

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate. ~ Amy Tan

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses. ~ Amy Tan

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

... knowing I had finally arrived where my life said I belonged. ~ Amy Tan

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

Forget about love. You will receive that many times, but none of it is lasting. ~ Amy Tan

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

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

And we exhaust ourselves with this playful joust, we look at each other, silently, eye to eye, no smiles, nothing more to be said. All at one, we both leap, like wolf mates reunited, searching for that which identifies us as belonging to each other: the scent of our skin, the taste of our tongues, the smoothness of our hair, the saltiness of our necks, the ridges of our spines, the slopes and creases we know so well yet feel so new. He is tender and I am wild, nuzzling and nipping, both of us tumbling until we lose all memory of who we are before this moment, because at his moment we are the same. ~ Amy Tan

Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her. ~ Amy Tan

All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.
-Ying Ying ~ Amy Tan

Your only shame is to have shame. ~ Amy Tan

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising. ~ Amy Tan

I've always been a magnet for guilt. ~ Amy Tan

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? ~ Amy Tan

Your life is what you see in front of you.
-An-mei ~ Amy Tan

I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it. We fail to see ninety percent of the glories of nature, for to do so would require vision that is simultaneously telescopic and microscopic. ~ Amy Tan

Kiss, a pat on the rump, and a deep inhalation of my scent, as if he and I were dogs. ~ Amy Tan

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

We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers ... In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story. ~ Amy Tan

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. ~ Amy Tan

But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.
-Ying Ying ~ Amy Tan

And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can't see her face. "Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize. "It doesn't matter," I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen." "Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother. And it's such a simple question. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Amy Tan

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

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye. ~ Amy Tan

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

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

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away. ~ Amy Tan

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