Amy Tan > Quotes

“We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.”
― Amy Tan

“Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.”
― Amy Tan

“Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“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, The Joy Luck Club

“Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“That was how dishonest and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets. ”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“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

“We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.
-Suyuan”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“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, The Joy Luck Club

“I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.
-Lindo”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“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, The Joy Luck Club

“I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.' My mother's version: 'You don't look, you get smash flat like sand dab.' (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.)

The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: 'Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.”
― Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

“I won't be what I'm not.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Your life is what you see in front of you.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“In two years' time, my scar became pale and shiny and I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Why do you think you are missing something you never had?”
― Amy Tan

“How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“Each person is made of five different elements, she told me.
Too much fire and you had a bad temper. That was like my father, whom my mother always critized for his cigarette habit and who always shouted back that she should feel guilty that he didn't let my mother speak her mind.
Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to other people's ideas, unable to stand on your own. This was like my Auntie An-mei.
Too much water and you flowed in too many different directions. like myself.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“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, The Joy Luck Club

“For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. ”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir? ”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“Writing what you wish was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.
-Ying Ying”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”
― Amy Tan

“Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.”
― Amy Tan

“But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me.
-Lindo”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Too many good things all seem the same after a while. ”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“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, The Joy Luck Club

“Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses. ”
― Amy Tan

“We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?”
― Amy Tan

“I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Chaos is the penance for leisure.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself.
I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. ”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened.
You do not need a psychiatrist to do this. 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 is just another bird drinking from your misery.
My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hind it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. that was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. they could not speak up. they could not run away. That was their fate.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club