Amy Tan - The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001)

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Amy Tan Quotes
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.

Amy Tan
They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.

Amy Tan
So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

Amy Tan
Writing what you wish was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

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

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
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