Amy Tan Quotes - Page 5

But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me. -Lindo

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

I did not lose myself all at once.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.

When I returned home that day, I saw my life as if I already knew the happy ending of a story. I looked around the house and thought, soon I will no longer have to see these walls and all the unhappiness they keep inside.

A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.

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

I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.

I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.

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

When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.

But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying

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

My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.

You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'

My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.

And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.

I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

I've always been a magnet for guilt.