Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.”

— Amy Tan

Featured in: Attitude Quotes, Fate Quotes

2. “Don’t think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.”

— Amy Tan

3. “That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.”

— Amy Tan

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

4. “I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.”

— Amy Tan

5. “Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all – all the Englishes I grew up with.”

— Amy Tan

6. “Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.”

— Amy Tan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

7. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

8. “You have to be your own person. You can’t let people’s opinions determine how you think about yourself. There’s a difference between identity and self-identity.”

— Amy Tan

9. “You see what power is holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them.”

— Amy Tan

10. “Your only shame is to have shame.”

— Amy Tan

11. “I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.”

— Amy Tan

12. “Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.”

— Amy Tan

13. “Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind – poom! – North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.”

— Amy Tan

14. “A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.”

— Amy Tan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

15. “Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!”

— Amy Tan

16. “With each passing day, I didn’t lose hope. I fought to have more.”

— Amy Tan

17. “Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”

— Amy Tan

18. “I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.”

— Amy Tan

19. “If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?”

— Amy Tan

20. “But I don’t have anything left inside of 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.”

— Amy Tan

21. “It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.”

— Amy Tan

22. “Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.”

— Amy Tan

23. “Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.”

— Amy Tan

24. “Memory feeds imagination.”

— Amy Tan

25. “I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.”

— Amy Tan

26. “It’s both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.”

— Amy Tan

27. “How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.”

— Amy Tan

28. “Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”

— Amy Tan

29. “Why do you think you are missing something you never had?”

— Amy Tan

30. “I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.”

— Amy Tan

31. “But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei.”

— Amy Tan

32. “Those who don’t heed the warnings don’t live to admit they were stupid not to do so.”

— Amy Tan

33. “For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.”

— Amy Tan

34. “I felt foolish and tired, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind to discover there was no one there.”

— Amy Tan

35. “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.”

— Amy Tan

36. “We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.”

— Amy Tan

37. “There’s no hope. There’s no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.”

— Amy Tan

38. “I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.”

— Amy Tan

39. “My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten.”

— Amy Tan

40. “So sad! This is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost?”

— Amy Tan

41. “I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.”

— Amy Tan

42. “How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?”

— Amy Tan

43. “You can’t have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?”

— Amy Tan

44. “What is the past but what we choose to remember?”

— Amy Tan

45. “Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.”

— Amy Tan

46. “You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.”

— Amy Tan

47. “I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial – what I present to people outwardly – but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.”

— Amy Tan

48. “I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.”

— Amy Tan

49. “From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don’t have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.”

— Amy Tan

50. “Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?”

— Amy Tan