Amy Tan

And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I'm cut loose, untethered, not belonging to anything or anybody.

"Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess."
- Ch. 5

What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delusion, then let me be deluded.

"I worried that Harold would someday get a new prescription for his glasses and he'd put them on one morning, look me up and down, and say, "Why, gosh, you aren't the girl I thought you were, are you?

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before before I have a chance to know her better.

Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

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

We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.

I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me.

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?

Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.

Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between the trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.