Quotes from Amy Tan

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

I have always known a thing before it happens.

And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.

And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.

From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.

In the mid-1800s, they were known also as 'singsong houses,' and the courtesans were actually master musicians.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

My grandmother. She's someone I never met, and I would've loved to have met her. She's been a huge influence on our entire family, not just me. She is a mystery. It's not clear exactly what about her is truth and myth.

Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.

For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

Luck is in every part of China. Many Chinese stores and restaurants have the word 'luck' in their names. The idea is that, just by using the word 'luck' in names of things, you can attract more of it. I think that's true in my life as well. You attract luck because you go after it.

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.

My mother's openness has remained inspiring to me. I strive to be a skeptic, in the best sense of that word: I question everything, and yet I'm open to everything. And I don't have immovable beliefs. My values shift and grow with my experiences - and as my context changes, so does what I believe.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.