Amy Tan Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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.

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
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
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
Only two kind of daughters. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!

Amy Tan
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy Tan