Quotes from Amy Tan

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before before I have a chance to know her better.

Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones. It is extraordinarily faithful in recording the most hideous details, and it will recall them for you in the future with moments that are even only vaguely similar.

All night long I worried, not about myself but about Jimmy. I imagined him looking for me, running through the park, looking in the movie theatres. He was a good man, considerate and kind, but he was not strong. He had never been through any kind of bad hardship before. So I worried.

How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently? How can you think everyone can be a hero, choosing death, when it is part of our nature to let go of brave thoughts at the last moment and cling to hope and life?

Do you know what morals are Violet? They're other people's rules. Do you know what a conscience is? Freedom to use your own intelligence to determine what is right or wrong. You possess that freedom and no one can remove it from you

Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.

I worried that Harold would someday get a new prescription for his glasses and he'd put them on one morning, look me up and down, and say, Why, gosh, you aren't the girl I thought you were, are you?

I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that's true or not, I know the intention was there. Becasue when I want something to happen-or not happen- I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

But he was so attuned to my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. HE had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had he'd pry away from me like little treasures.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them.

I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

Our world is full of temporary promises and guile. It is necessarily so. We are not evil people, this is just how we survive. There are only a few steps that separate success from failure. Understand this and you will not suffer from disillusionment as often as I did.

If you don't take a chance, someone else will give you his luck. And if you get bad luck, then you need to take another chance to turn things from bad to good.

Fate changes when you change your clothes.

What do you think was the very first sound to become a word, a meaning?' ... And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising.

Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn´t matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst.

A good government had to guide its people, sometimes gently, sometimes strictly, just as parents did. It could allow certain freedoms, but in a style that suited the country.

i'm not saying fate happens without blame. but when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.

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.

I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true.

It's a luxury being a writer because all you ever think about is life.