Amy Tan
I have always known a thing before it happens.Collection: Joy Luck Club
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.Collection: Education
Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?Collection: Memories
What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?... And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside.Collection: Color
And now I have to stop. Because every time I remember this, I have to cry a little by myself. I don't know why something that made me so happy then feels so sad now. Maybe that is the way it is with the best memories.Collection: Memories
I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy TanCollection: Secret
If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?Collection: People
I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.Collection: Two
too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.Collection: Sorrow
And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.Collection: Blood
My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.Collection: Mother
My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.Collection: Mother
Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.Collection: Mother
Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.Collection: Stupid
She [my mother] said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.Collection: Mother
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?Collection: Want
Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.Collection: Heart
Chaos is the penance for leisure.Collection: Penance
I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually, thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... "Come from the South, blow from the wind - poom! - North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen."Collection: Mother
Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had soulsCollection: Teenager
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. -LindoCollection: Beautiful
Fate changes when you change your clothes.Collection: Fate
You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?Collection: Saving
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.Collection: Moving
You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.Collection: Pride
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.Collection: Love
Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?Collection: Hate
I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Daughter
While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.Collection: Speak
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.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Mean
Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.Collection: Pain
Your only shame is to have shame.Collection: Shame
You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-meiCollection: Thinking
For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Want
With hope, a mind is always free.Collection: Mind
All objects exist in a moment of time.Collection: Moments
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.Collection: Book
Dementia was like a truth serum.Collection: Dementia
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.Collection: Love
Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Mother
I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.Collection: Opportunity
Over time, passion wanes, differences don't.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Motivation
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.Collection: Betrayal