Amy Tan Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming — well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?

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

Amy Tan
People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.

Amy Tan
Even if I had expected it, even if I had known what I was going to do with my life, it would have knocked the wind out of me. When something that violent hits you, you can't help but lose your balance and fall. And after you pick yourself up, you realize you can't trust anybody to save you- not your husband, not your mother, not God. So what can you do to stop yourself from tilting and falling all over again?

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

Amy Tan
How can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind — poom! — North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.

Amy Tan
Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.

Amy Tan
Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
That 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? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei

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

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

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

Amy Tan
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.

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

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
Her mouth dropped open to let this thought come in and nourish her brain.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts.

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

Amy Tan
Our breakup was the result of many things: a wrong beginning, bad timing, years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy.

Amy Tan
Now that I'm angry at Harold, it's hard to remember what was so remarkable about him.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.

Amy Tan