Amy Tan Quotes

At first, I thought it was because I was raised with all this Chinese humility... Or maybe it was because when you're Chinese you're supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves. But my therapist said, Why do you blamd your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we shoudl have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age.

Lack of clarity is a writer's truth.

I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that's true or not, I know the intention was there. Becasue 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.

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.

I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them.

Suffer more now, suffer less later.

Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pissed in front of each other never happened. We don't use any of the baby talk, code words, or short hand gestures that had been our language of intimacy, the proof that we belonged to each other.

My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.

But he was so attuned to my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. HE had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had he'd pry away from me like little treasures.

Being able to restrain my emotions isn’t a great victory — it’s the pitiful proof of lost love.

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

Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

All objects exist in a moment of time.

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.