Amy Tan Quotes

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

My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Libraries are the pride of the city.

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.

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.

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

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.

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

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

Memory feeds imagination.

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

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.

Chaos is the penance for leisure.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.

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

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

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

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

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

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

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

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

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

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

God, life changes faster than you think.

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

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

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.

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

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

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

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.