Amy Tan
Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.Collection: Fate
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. 5Collection: Play
How I saw in her my own true nature. What was beneath my skin. Inside my bones... Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain. This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. 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 before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Motivation
Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.Collection: Confused
After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?Collection: Past
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.Collection: Girl
Too many good things all seem the same after a while.Collection: Good Things
But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-meiCollection: Regret
If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-meiCollection: Choices
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.Collection: Opportunity
To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.Collection: Life
To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-meiCollection: Loses
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.Collection: Giving Up
Shanghainese people are good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality, Shanghai personality becomes part of yours.Collection: Growing Up
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Magic
I did not lose myself all at once.Collection: Loses
It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.Collection: Hate
I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.Collection: Children
A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.Collection: Mother
Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-meiCollection: Life Is
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.Collection: Wall
I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?Collection: Children
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.Collection: Fall
But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying YingCollection: Daughter
wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same 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. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.Collection: Daughter
I felt foolish and tired, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind to discover there was no one there.Collection: Running
...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.Collection: Mountain Peaks
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.Collection: Family
If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.Collection: Lying
And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.Collection: Form
I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.Collection: Dust
All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying YingCollection: Running
Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Mother
It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Responsibility
We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.Collection: Rotten
We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -SuyuanCollection: Wish
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.Collection: Dream
I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.Collection: Memories
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-meiCollection: Mother
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Mother
Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.Collection: Writing
Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.Collection: Tree
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.Collection: Writing