Amy tan quotes

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

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

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

Hope is the adrenalin of the soul.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.

Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

Your only shame is to have shame.

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

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didnt always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

Hardships can harden even the best person.

I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

With hope, a mind is always free.

My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances. We lived in San Francisco's Chinatown. Like most of the other Chinese children who played in the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, I didn't think we were poor. My bowl was always full, three five-course meals every day, beginning with a soup full of mysterious things I didn't want to know the names of.

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

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

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.

Clichés are static, the emotion behind them long spent. If you are tempted to use them, here is a saying of my mother’s: Fang pi bu-cho, cho pi bu-fang. Basically that translates to: "Loud farts don’t stink, and the really smelly ones don’t make a sound." In other words: When you’re full of beans, you just blow a lot of hot air. If you want to have a real impact, be deadly but silent. Oh, also recognize the difference between a bad cliché and a good quotation. My mother’s saying is a good quotation. You should use it often.

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.

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

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.

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.

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

I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

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

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

I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.

Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.

Memory feeds imagination.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The life we receive is not always what we choose.

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.

I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.

Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between the trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.

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.

Over time, passion wanes, differences don't.

People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.

I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.

I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?

Dementia was like a truth serum.

You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.

I take a few quick sips. "This is really good." And I mean it. I have never tasted tea like this. It is smooth, pungent, and instantly addicting. "This is from Grand Auntie," my mother explains. "She told me 'If I buy the cheap tea, then I am saying that my whole life has not been worth something better.' A few years ago she bought it for herself. One hundred dollars a pound." "You're kidding." I take another sip. It tastes even better.

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

What is a secret wish?" "It is what you want but cannot ask.

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

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

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.

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

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.

My sisters and I stand, arms around each other, laughind and wiping the tears from each others eyes. The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my family hands me the snapshot. My sisters and I watch quietly together, eager to see what develops. Ghe grey-greensurface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in suprise to see, her long-cherished wish.

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.

I have always known a thing before it happens.

You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei

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.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

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

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.

I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.

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.

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

With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more.

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

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.

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.

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

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

When I returned home that day, I saw my life as if I already knew the happy ending of a story. I looked around the house and thought, soon I will no longer have to see these walls and all the unhappiness they keep inside.

I did not lose myself all at once.

How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?

The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.

External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.

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.

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

Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

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.

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.

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

I was punched breathless by the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer.

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

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.

We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

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

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

Libraries are the pride of the city.

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

For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me... All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me... We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing; unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

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

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength..."strongest wind cannot be seen."

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.