Amy Tan Quotes

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

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.

I tried to keep very still, but my heart felt like crickets scratching to get out of the cage.

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... Come from the South, blow from the wind — poom! — North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.

"My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said "fate" because she couldn't pronounce the "th" sound in "faith".

And later I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most I could have was hope, and with that I wasn't denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here's where the odds should be placed.

I remember the day I started thinking this, it was such a revelation to me. It was the day my mother lost her faith in God. She found that things of unquestioned certainty could never be trusted again.

We had gone to the beach, to a secluded spot south of the city near Devil's Slide. My father had read in Sunset magazine that this was a good place to catch ocean perch. And although my father was not a fisherman but a pharmacist's assistant who had once been a doctor in China, he believed in his nenkan, his ability to do anything he put his mind to. My mother believed she had nenkan to cook anything my father had a mind to catch. It was this belief in their nenkan that had brought my parents to America. It had enabled them to have seven children and buy a house in Sunset district with very little money. It had given them the confidence to believe their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that house gods had only benevolent things to report and our ancestors were pleased, that lifetime warranties meant our lucky streak would never break, that all the elements were now in balance, the right amount of wind and water."

I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t.
The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.
-Ying Ying

I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.

To keep false hopes is to prolong misery.

All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

I still don't know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason. But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well. Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?...Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.

Suffer more now, suffer less later.

Look at this face. Do you see my foolish hope?

I was the daughter of my father's wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi , the spirit that caused me so much pain.
Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.