Amy Tan Quotes - Page 3

That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.

The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

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.

You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.

I love my daughter. She and I have shared my 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.

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.

We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

But I don't have anything left inside of me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.

With hope, a mind is always free.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.

Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.

We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.