Amy Tan Quotes

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

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.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

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

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

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

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

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.

Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?

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.

I have always known a thing before it happens.

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.

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.

And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.

And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.

And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.

But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei

My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.

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

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

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

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

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

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

When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

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