Amy Tan Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Amy Tan
Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?

Amy Tan
Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
People look at me as this very, I don't know, Confucius-like wise person — which I'm not. They don't see all the shit that I've been through.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei

Amy Tan
Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

Amy Tan
And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?

Amy Tan
Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan
I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.

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

Amy Tan
I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.

Amy Tan
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

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

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

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

Amy Tan
If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.

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

Amy Tan
He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

Amy Tan
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.

Amy Tan