Quotes from Amy Tan

Confucius say a woman is worth a thousand words. Tell your wife she's used up her total

In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother's story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.

Some of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English.

But you can't stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.

It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

So this is what my mother-in-law taught me: To protect my husband so he would protect me. To fear him and think this was respect.

once you set up your story, you should step into it and write as if you are living in that fictional dream. The result would be a story that would make readers feel that they, too, were in a seamless story, a dream.

This Shanghai was not a place but a feeling of contentment. I was returning with myself whole and unbroken—limbs, mind, and spirit. I had discarded pride

Cuándo algo va contra tu naturaleza no estás equilibrado... Por eso nunca puedes avanzar, siempre estás retrocediendo.

I looked at her and saw she was crying. And I also began to cry again, that this was our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond.

as to our hopes, our dreams, our secret desires, we couldn't talk about those. They were to vague, too frightening, too important. And so they stayed inside us, growing like a cancer, a body eating away at itself. In retrospect I'm amazed how long our marriage lasted.

Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.

When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he's thinking of pulling up roots.

Ahora sabes por qué razón es inútil llorar. Tus lágrimas no se llevan tus penas, sino que alimentan la alegría de otros. Por eso has de aprender a tragártelas.

My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn't begin to express in their fragile English.

And once you reached the top, you would be able to see everything and feel such happiness it would be enough to never have worries in your life ever again.

I am crying now, sobbing and laughing at the same time, seeing but not understanding this loyalty to my mother.

Así es como se cura una herida: empieza a cerrarse sobre sí misma, a proteger aquello que tanto duele, y, una vez cerrada, ya no se ve lo que hay debajo, aquello que provocaba el dolor.

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.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory. I still remember the first time I felt it.

Why can't I ask?" "This is because . . . because if you ask it . . . it is no longer a wish but a selfish desire," said Amah. "Haven't I taught you—that it is wrong to think of your own needs? A girl can never ask, only listen.

This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. 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 before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.