Amy Tan Quotes - Page 7

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

And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

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

And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

I felt foolish and tired, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind to discover there was no one there.

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

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.

If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.

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

When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?

He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.

I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away a long time ago to what I had imagined was a safer place. And hiding in this place, behind my invisible barriers, I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was finally there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in.

To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei

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

I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?

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

I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. -Lindo

You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally--that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning)