Amy Tan quotes - page 4

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. (Amy Tan)
Memory feeds imagination.
Amy Tan
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
Amy Tan
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
Amy Tan
And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.
Amy Tan
We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.
Amy Tan
I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
Amy Tan
People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
Amy Tan
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
Amy Tan
I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.
Amy Tan
Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her. (Amy Tan)
too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
Amy Tan
We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
Amy Tan
And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose.
Amy Tan
A mother is always the beggining. She is how things begin.
Amy Tan
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
Amy Tan
My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
Amy Tan
I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
Amy Tan
I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
Amy Tan
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
Amy Tan
Chaos is the penance for leisure. (Amy Tan)
We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan.
Amy Tan
Because 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. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh. -An-mei.
Amy Tan
You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei.
Amy Tan
If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei.
Amy Tan