Quotes from Amy Tan

When there is great suffering, he said, everyone struggles the same. But when there is peace, no one wants to be the same. The rich no longer share. The less rich envy and steal.

Life was good until the purges came. After that, there was nothing to do except flee into the jungle, high up, where it was so thick only wild things grew. When the purges stopped Black Spot and his friends and cousin went quietly to the town of Nyang Shwe, where they were not known. They procured black-market identity cards of dead people with good reputations. After that they lived two ways: in the open life of the dead, and in the hidden life of the living.

Turn around then and lean against that boulder with your bottom facing me. I'll enter you from behind. Are you damp yet?" In

The waters of Inle Lake are blue and so shallow you can see the bottom on a cloudless day. This is where ladies bathe their newborn babies. This is where the dead float with their eyes toward the sky. This was where my friends came the morning of Christmas Eve.

my room, and to rub his scent off me.

back as a mud-smashing

Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only one to judge your own decisions and actions

Since I'm not dead yet I can talk back.

Every Sunday, the Jesus Worshippers asked me, Do you believe? I had to say not yet. I wanted to say yes to be polite. But then I would have been lying, and when I died maybe they would come after me and make me pay two kinds of penalty to the foreign devil, one for not believing, another for pretending that I did.

Lies spread faster than you can catch them.

Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown.

Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.

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.

A portrait,' she had said, 'should be that of a person who was breathing at the time it was painted.It should capture one of those breaths.

vampire hours of rest between dawn and noon.

the living death of safety and stagnation.

If I can push out my inhibitions, I will have access to intuitions

Si el amor persiste pese al dolor de las diferencias, hay que preservarlo como una joya rara

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment.

Could you wrap your arms around me to keep me warm?

We both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bend toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other and kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.

I want us to love each other so deeply we ache with the fullness of it.

Fate once made you American. Fate took it away.

and it's ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus's dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.