Quotes from Amy Tan

And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I'm cut loose, untethered, not belonging to anything or anybody.

Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pissed in front of each other never happened. We don't use any of the baby talk, code words, or short hand gestures that had been our language of intimacy, the proof that we belonged to each other.

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls

This is the kind of China you Americans always see in the movies - the poor countryside, people wearing big hats to protect themselves from the sun. No, I never wore a hat like that! I was from Shanghai. That's like thinking someone from San Francisco wears a cowboy hat and rides a horse. Ridiculous!

Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

I ask myself, How can I relax? How can I let go of everything that's happened? You need complete trust to do that.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

In It's Only Temporary, Evan Handler confronts the ambiguities of life backward, forward, and in between. With hilarious honesty he reflects on the realization that we can start over again. It's Only Temporary is a heartfelt book for all of us who are getting younger and older at the same time.

Even when I worked in that world, I still wanted love so strong that the man would have no interest in another woman. Maybe you will always be incapable of giving that kind of love. You tell me I want too much. And maybe I do. But like you and your imagination, I can't help but be that way.

Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.

I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.

Maybe the kind of love that would comfort me did not exist. Perhaps I expected too much of love and no one existed who could ever meet my unceasing and bottomless need for it.

These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster.

After a while, I hurt so much I didn't feel any difference.

In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations.

I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened.

I sat down and remembered a saying Old Aunt used to tell me whenever I complained that I had been wrongly accused: "Don't strike a flea on a tiger's head." Don't settle one trouble only to make a bigger one.

How can I argue with someone who makes no sense?

This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Beacuse sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost.

But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.

My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself perfectly in my memory.

Entonces debes enseñarle esta misma lección a mi hija. Cómo perder la inocencia pero no la esperanza. Cómo reír eternamente.

The East is where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.