Amy Tan Quotes

I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything.
I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?

Your life is what you see in front of you.
-An-mei

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

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

If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever.
-An-mei

Too many good things all seem the same after a while.

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

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.

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.

Why do you think you are missing something you never had?