Amy Tan Quotes

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

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.

I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

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

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

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

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.

I thought about things, the pros and cons. But in the end I would be so confused, because I never believed there was ever any one right answer, yet there were many wrong ones.

Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?

I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can't stop people from wishing.

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.

What use for? asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. You put something else on top, everything fall down.

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief.

I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true.