Quotes from Amy Tan

This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!—it is too beautiful to eat.

When you lose your face it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.

My father put his life in God's hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen.

Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture." "Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

bad, how likely is it to come

We're not gonna know who we are as people until we've faced crises or loss, or when we have inexhaustible hope. Why do we hope? Why don't we give up? Who gives up?

glowered, and she returned

This is beauty, and this is beauty, and you are beauty, and love is beauty and we are beauty. We are divine, unchanged by time.

If you have a seriousness of purpose, which is to understand yourself, human nature, the world, and the conflicts that make us infinitely interesting, you will find the stories that you want o tell.

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking. "I

Nankingis on lumi nagu kõrge ametnik - ei käi liiga tihti, ei jää liiga kaukas

Anyone can have original style," he countered. "And yet no one truly does. We're influenced by those who came before us, beginning with the painters thousands of years ago who imitated nature.

As a precaution, Ruth had also gnawed over the worst possibilities—brain tumor, Alzheimer's, stroke—believing this would ensure that it was not these things. History had always proven that she worried for nothing.

I realized I am self-centered, that I'm used to thinking about me first. But I also realized that you tend to think about you second. It's as though I had permission from you to be less responsible. I'm not saying it's your fault. But you have to learn to take back, grab it when it's offered. Don't fight it. Don't get all tense thinking it's complicated. Just take it, and if you want to be polite, say thank you.

I know what to avoid, what to worry about. I'm like those kids who live with gunfire going off around them. I don't want pain. I don't want to die. I don't want to see other people around me die. But I don't have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance I had carried around like my portable vanity with its broken mirror.

This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate.

Later, Miss Banner pointed to a man trying to squeeze a barrel that was too large through a doorway that was too small. Hope. Miss Banner said. But to me, this was not hope, this was stupidity, rice for brains. ... I wondered whether foreigners had feelings that were entirely different from those of Chinese people. Did they think all our hopes were stupid?

Where did he go when he left us? I spied the new journal he had started using just last week and held it against my chest. This was who he was. But it also was not. It was sad and beautiful knowledge that a person cannot be found elsewhere but in his own spirit. No one could possess it.

this book. I will try to repay all of you with sustenance

you must work toward the Four Necessities: jewelry, furniture, a seasonal contract with a stipend, and a comfortable retirement.

She didn't understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger.

Poor service, bad treatment, no respect - that's the penalty for not speaking English well in America.

But your thoughts and emotions after death are no different from what they were when you were alive, I suppose. You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.