Amy Tan Quotes

I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale of relying on proof through fact.

Fate changes when you change your clothes.

This is beauty...and you are beauty, and love is beauty and we are beauty. We are divine, unchanged by time.

It's a luxury being a writer because all you ever think about is life.

Accept love when it is offered, Violet. Return love and not suspicion. Then you'll receive more. - Loyalty Tang

Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don't you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.

"When you are told, "It was meant to be," ask, "Who meant it? What does it really mean?" Is someone trying to make you accept an undesirable situation or one in which you have doubts? When you are told, "Shit happens," remember that plenty of other things happen as well, such as generosity, forgiveness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. When you are told, "It's simply fate," ask yourself, "What is simple about it? What are the alternatives of fate? What is fate's opposite?

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.

I was greedy, she warned, and could not fill my heart with enough pleasure, my stomach with enough contentment, my body with enough sleep. I was like a rice basket with a rat hole at the bottom, and thus could not be satisfied and overflow, nor could I be filled. I would never know the full depth and breadth of love, beauty, or happiness. She said it like a curse.

Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn´t matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst.

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. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. And believing in ghosts — that's believing that love never dies. 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.

This is the kind of China you Americans always see in the movies - the poor countryside, people wearing big hats to protect themselves from the sun. No, I never wore a hat like that! I was from Shanghai. That's like thinking someone from San Francisco wears a cowboy hat and rides a horse. Ridiculous!

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls

I ask myself, How can I relax? How can I let go of everything that's happened? You need complete trust to do that.

I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.