Quotes from Amy Tan

I now lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see it, they could not yank me out of it.

When you touch a man's nostalgia, he is yours.

use your brain as cleverly as you use your hips and mouth.

Sometimes I feel like I'm a pair of eyes and ears, and I'm just trying to stay safe and make sense of what's happening. I don't want pain. I don't want to die. I don't want to see other people around me die. But I don't have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

The mind fools the eye. The eye makes us fools.

it's your own fears that give them the power to chase you.

No one ever asks about the language.

Luyi, it means 'all that you wish.' 

Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story.

Fear, I think, is the worst element of religions of all kinds. It is used to justify more fear, as well as hatred, lack of compassion, intolerance, and war.

Her mastery of the language was a blissful expression of the spirit to her, like playing a musical instrument.

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.

We could choose what we wanted to believe. However, she added, any student who did not choose to believe in Jesus was a corpse-eating maggot, and when this unbeliever died, she would tumble into the underworld, where her body would be pierced by a bayonet, roasted like a duck, and forced to suffer all kinds of tortures that were worse than what was happening in Manchuria.

The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The

Those were the reasons we both knew how deep love was, the shared pain that would outlast any pain we caused each other.

you became an expert on silence?' she joked. 'I'm not an expert on anything. but I love language in all forms - sounds and words, facial expressions, hand gestures, body posture and its rhythms, what people mean but don't necessarily say with words. I've always loved words, the power of them.' 'so what's your favorite word?' 'hm, that's an excellent question.' he fell quiet, stroking his beard in thought.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

What happened in Nanking, I couldn't claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.

Do you know why that is? Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

Japanese chase-away juice." And

But how can anyone truly understand another's suffering unless he has felt the wound being made and the moment trust died?

Mile after mile, all of it familiar, yet not, this distance that separates us, me from my mother.

Praise, I had learned, was temporary. What someone else controlled and doled out to you, and if you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn.

She was either temperamental, meaning short-tempered and unhappy, or she was melancholy, meaning listless and unhappy.