Amy Tan Quotes
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.
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Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!
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How I saw in her my own true nature. What was beneath my skin. Inside my bones... Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain. This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. 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 before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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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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I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.
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I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.
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But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying
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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.
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How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.
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It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.
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I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
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I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.
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She [my mother] said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.
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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.
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We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.
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Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.
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A mother is always the beggining. She is how things begin.
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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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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?
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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?
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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.
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wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.
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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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And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.
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Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
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Fate changes when you change your clothes.
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I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
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too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
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