Amy Tan Quotes

how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact...

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modern ink fr...

Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, bu...

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

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

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

Dementia was like a truth serum.

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

God, life changes faster than you think.

...you have to believe in its principles. Anything is possible, as long as it's for the good of the ...

Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing d...

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

[Karen Lundegaard] was quite frail, debilitated by metastatic breast cancer, which she had long know...

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

Was there ever a great true love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my aff...

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

I had thus learned to push down my feelings, to force myself to not care, to do nothing and let thin...

...A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happin...

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

I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope...

...I was like a bird, my wings once carried on a wind of lies. I would beat those wings to stay alof...

I now lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see...

Even when I worked in that world, I still wanted love so strong that the man would have no interest ...

The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few ...

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

It felt like all the truth got whitewashed with fake happiness," she said, "only it was not happy an...

...and it's ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a woode...

What happened to Violet was terrible, and I’m not saying fate happens without blame. But when fate t...

Maybe all Americans who suffer from melancholy act as if they have gone mad. But I truly thought he ...

Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from ...

Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked...

I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her ima...

I take a few quick sips. "This is really good." And I mean it. I have never tasted tea like this. It...

A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and p...

But you can't stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become li...

That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurti...

Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you...

You can't stay in the dark for too long. Something inside you starts to fade, and you become like a ...

She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noti...

It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to ...

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

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant...

Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. ...

My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet a...

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must lea...

Auntie An-mei had cried before she left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich and...

My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet a...

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the d...

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

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her...

What should we do?", I asked, and I had a pained feeling I thought was the beginning of love. In tho...

Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He pra...

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the d...

If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I ha...

And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusation...

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without w...

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

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't ...

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

Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying yo...

If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak ...

All objects exist in a moment of time.

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

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind...

Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time.

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All obje...

I do not consider myself a religious person, because I don't adhere to a particular religion or fait...

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

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings...

Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This lo...

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard bef...

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales a...

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social real...

What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delu...

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out...

Whenever I'm with my [teenager] I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines...

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain the sam...

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination,...

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

No one can travel your own road for you you must travel it for yourself. My faith in this stems from...

I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.