Amy Tan

Our world is full of temporary promises and guile. It is necessarily so. We are not evil people, this is just how we survive. There are only a few steps that separate success from failure. Understand this and you will not suffer from disillusionment as often as I did.

Accept love when it is offered, Violet. Return love and not suspicion. Then you'll receive more. - Loyalty Tang

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.

With hope, a mind is always free.

These are the things I know are true ...

Fate changes when you change your clothes.

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn´t matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst.

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

I ask myself, How can I relax? How can I let go of everything that's happened? You need complete trust to do that.

You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear
in your hand and showing it to them

What do you think was the very first sound to become a word, a meaning?' ... And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

This is beauty...and you are beauty, and love is beauty and we are beauty. We are divine, unchanged by time.