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.

You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again.

...As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness...

All night long I worried, not about myself but about Jimmy. I imagined him looking for me, running through the park, looking in the movie theatres. He was a good man, considerate and kind, but he was not strong. He had never been through any kind of bad hardship before. So I worried.

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.

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

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.

I, not anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel if by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere — on water and land.

But I don't have anything left inside of me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

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

When I want something to happen — or not happen — I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid. I found the opportunity.

You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally — that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning)

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

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.

Suffer more now, suffer less later.