Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.”

— Amy Tan

52. “You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei.”

— Amy Tan

53. “Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.”

— Amy Tan

54. “All objects exist in a moment of time.”

— Amy Tan

55. “You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.”

— Amy Tan

56. “With hope, a mind is always free.”

— Amy Tan

57. “Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it – that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.”

— Amy Tan

58. “Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.”

— Amy Tan

59. “If someone offers to take your burden, you need to know he is serious, not just being polite and kind. Polite and kind do not last.”

— Amy Tan

60. “And now I have to stop. Because every time I remember this, I have to cry a little by myself. I don’t know why something that made me so happy then feels so sad now. Maybe that is the way it is with the best memories.”

— Amy Tan

61. “My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.”

— Amy Tan

62. “I have always known a thing before it happens.”

— Amy Tan

63. “It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.”

— Amy Tan

64. “You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you’ve just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.”

— Amy Tan

65. “The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost.”

— Amy Tan

66. “If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.”

— Amy Tan

67. “My mother had a look on her face that I’ll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

69. “All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying Ying.”

— Amy Tan

70. “Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?”

— Amy Tan

71. “We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.”

— Amy Tan

72. “On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother’s case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.”

— Amy Tan

73. “And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose.”

— Amy Tan

74. “I love my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature.”

— Amy Tan

75. “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.”

— Amy Tan

76. “The East is where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.”

— Amy Tan

77. “I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.”

— Amy Tan

78. “Yesterday my daughter said to me, ‘My marriage is falling apart.’ And now all she can do is watch it falling.”

— Amy Tan

79. “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.”

— Amy Tan

80. “We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan.”

— Amy Tan

81. “I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place.”

— Amy Tan

82. “For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.”

— Amy Tan

83. “Now you see,? said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, ’why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.”

— Amy Tan

84. “So much of history is mystery. We don’t know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.”

— Amy Tan

85. “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?”

— Amy Tan

86. “We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”

— Amy Tan

87. “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. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh. -An-mei.”

— Amy Tan

88. “Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?”

— Amy Tan

89. “Dementia was like a truth serum.”

— Amy Tan

90. “That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.”

— Amy Tan

91. “I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.”

— Amy Tan

92. “To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei.”

— Amy Tan

93. “I feel I’ve always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I’m just writing from experience what’s concerned me.”

— Amy Tan

94. “My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.”

— Amy Tan

95. “But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying.”

— Amy Tan

96. “Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East.”

— Amy Tan

97. “After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?”

— Amy Tan

98. “I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in control.”

— Amy Tan

99. “If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.”

— Amy Tan

100. “Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.”

— Amy Tan