Quotes from Amy Tan

Writers by nature are subversive, observant, and discerning, and their voice contains that.

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

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!--it is too beautiful to eat.

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

Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before I have a chance to know her better.

The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night.

But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness.

The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

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?

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.

I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.

I love my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature.

Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.

But whenever Wen Fu began to shout, she always cried, cried all night long, and would not stop until I told her more lies. "Yiku, be good, and your life will be good too." How could I know that this is how a mother teaches her daughter to be afraid?

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.

We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.

It's my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort

Teddy once told me that it's natural that we feel alone, and that's because our hearts are different from others and we don't even know how. When we're in love, as if by magic, our different hearts come together perfectly toward the same desire. Eventually, the differences return, and then comes heartache and mending, and, in between, much loneliness and fear. If love remains despite the pain of those differences, it must be guarded as rare...

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more.

I learned about opening moves and why it's important to control the center early on; the shortest distance between two points is straight down the middle.

I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity.