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You see what power is – holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
Amy Tan
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Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.
Amy Tan
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Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
Amy Tan
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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
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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
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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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.
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For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.
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If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.
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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.
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And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
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Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with
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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?
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Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
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If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
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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.
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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.
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Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
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I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength..."strongest wind cannot be seen."
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With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more.
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Amy Tan
Born:
February 19, 1952
(age 72)
Bio:
Amy Tan is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience. Her best-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages.
Known for:
The Joy Luck Club (1989)
The Valley of Amazement (2013)
The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001)
The Kitchen God's Wife (1991)
The Hundred Secret Senses (1995)
Most used words:
life
mother
people
lost
love
hope
remember
wind
years
felt
time
lose
daughter
person
fate
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