Quotes from Amy Tan

A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he's just another bird drinking from your misery.

That is the way with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

I asked myself, what is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?

I had thus learned to push down my feelings, to force myself to not care, to do nothing and let things happen, come what may.

For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, 'This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.' And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

The next world is 'segregated'? You can go to the World of Yin only if you're Chinese? No-no! Miss Banner, she not Chinese, she go to Yin World. All depend what you love, what you believe. You love Jesus, go Jesus House. You love Allah, go Allah Land. You love sleep, go sleep. What if you don't believe in anything for sure before you die? Then you go big place, like Disneyland, many places can go try--you like, you decide. No charge, of course.

Being a dominatrix gave me the ultimate power: to sing without self-consciousness.

Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.

It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. 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.

I also found out why I should never reveal the why to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.

And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age.

And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?

My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said fate, because she couldn't pronounce the th sound in faith. And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy.

Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don't you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.

Auntie An-mei had cried before she left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich and happy by communist standards. But when she got home, she cried to me that everyone had a palm out and she was the only one who left with an empty hand.

And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can't see her face. "Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize. "It doesn't matter," I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen." "Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother. And it's such a simple question.

When the anesthesia of love wears off, you suffer the pain of consequence.

Was there ever a great true love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections?...I could not let myself become that unmindful. Isn't that what love is - losing your mind? 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.

If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would nowhere else to go

If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry," said Popo.

A moment is not the same as time.