Quotes from Amy Tan

Puedes imaginar lo que se siente cuando uno no quiere estar dentro ni fuera, cuando desea estar en ninguna parte y desaparecer?

knowing I had finally arrived where my life said I belonged.

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.

Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods.

What was worse, we asked ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?

Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

Lebih baik jadi orang yang TIDAK TERLUPAKAN daripada orang yang MEMBOSANKAN -

In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.

The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The Centrifugal Force of Arguments": The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

I also found out why i should never reveal why to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.

But to pretend that all was right with the world, I first had to know what was wrong.

If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.

Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story.

We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.

By my father's own handwritten definition: Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.

Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.

In a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family.

I often reread passages of Lolita for its exquisite language. To me, Lolita has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life.

Through trial with death, you discover your power. Through trial, you shed your mortal flesh, layer after layer, until you become who you are supposed to be.

We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.

Karen Lundegaard] was quite frail, debilitated by metastatic breast cancer, which she had long known she had but for which she had been unable to get adequate treatment because she lacked medical insurance. (If you mention anything about me, she said, tell people that.)

But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good, it warned. And they you'll always be nothing.

But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.

The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.