Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club (1989)

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

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
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
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
If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.

Amy Tan
We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

Amy Tan
I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations." - Two Kinds

Amy Tan
Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.

Amy Tan
And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Amy Tan
Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.

Amy Tan
Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.

Amy Tan
But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.

Amy Tan
We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.

Amy Tan
When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no "chuming" no inside knowledge of things. If she had "chuming" she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.

Amy Tan
We were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

Amy Tan
On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.

Amy Tan
My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.

Amy Tan
For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

Amy Tan
It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

Amy Tan
I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.

Amy Tan
I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

Amy Tan
If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?

Amy Tan
Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East.

Amy Tan
Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

Amy Tan
Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh. -An-mei

Amy Tan
All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

Amy Tan
Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.

Amy Tan
Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.

Amy Tan
Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.

Amy Tan