Amy Tan

It's a luxury being a writer because all you ever think about is life.

That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.

Writers by nature are subversive, observant, and discerning, and their voice contains that.

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

He has always been politely indifferent. But what's the Chinese word that means indifferent because you can't see any differences?

Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?

People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.

Chaos is the penance for leisure.

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

I do not consider myself a religious person, because I don't adhere to a particular religion or faith or prescribed beliefs, as did my father, who was a Baptist minister. And I am not an atheist, one who thinks that belief in anything beyond the here and now and the rational is delusion. I love science, but I allow for mystery, things that can never be proven by a rational mind. I am a person who thinks about the nature of the spirit when I write. I think about what can't be known and only imagined. I often sense a spirit or force or meaning beyond myself. I leave it open as to what the spirit is, but I continue to make guesses — that it could be the universal binding of the emotion of love, or a joyful quality of humanity, or a collective unconscious that turns out to be a unified conscience. The spirit could be all those worshiped by all the religions, even those that deny the validity of others. It could be that we all exist in all ten dimensions of a string-theory universe and are seeding memories in all of them and occupy them simultaneously as memory. Or we exist only as thought and out perception that it is a physical world is a delusion. The nature of spirit could also be my mother and my grandmother and that they really do serve as my muses as I fondly imagine them doing at times. Or maybe the nature of the spirit is a freer imagination. I've often thought that imagination was the conduit to compassion, and compassion is a true spiritual nature. Whatever the spirit might be, I am not basing what I do in this life on any expected reward or punishment in the hereafter or thereafter. It is enough that I feel blessed — and by whom or what I don't know — but I receive it with gratitude that I am a writer and my work is to imagine all the possibilities.

She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this direction, another form behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away . . . I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.

The things one had to do in life sometimes had nothing to do with what was fun or convenient.

A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use.

How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?

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.