Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Amy Tan

102. “Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.”

— Amy Tan

103. “And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.”

— Amy Tan

104. “People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.”

— Amy Tan

105. “Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.”

— Amy Tan

106. “Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei.”

— Amy Tan

107. “Too many good things all seem the same after a while.”

— Amy Tan

108. “When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.”

— Amy Tan

109. “Sure I loved him – too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I’m number one in his life. I’m not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.”

— Amy Tan

110. “Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.”

— Amy Tan

111. “In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.”

— Amy Tan

112. “I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn’t understand her English, because she was Chinese.”

— Amy Tan

113. “It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.”

— Amy Tan

114. “I tried to keep very still, but my heart felt like crickets scratching to get out of the cage.”

— Amy Tan

115. “The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. 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.”

— Amy Tan

116. “I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn’t know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.”

— Amy Tan

117. “He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: ‘You speak,’ he said, ’the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.”

— Amy Tan

118. “I won’t be what I’m not. -Jing-mei.”

— Amy Tan

119. “In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations.”

— Amy Tan

120. “Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.”

— Amy Tan

121. “My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.”

— Amy Tan

122. “There are a lot of people who think that’s what’s needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.”

— Amy Tan

123. “To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.”

— Amy Tan

124. “Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don’t you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.”

— Amy Tan

125. “Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.”

— Amy Tan

126. “Whenever I’m with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.”

— Amy Tan

127. “That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.”

— Amy Tan

128. “I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.”

— Amy Tan

129. “If she doesn’t speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn’t try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei.”

— Amy Tan

130. “I also found out why I should never reveal the “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.”

— Amy Tan

131. “I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.”

— Amy Tan

132. “They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.”

— Amy Tan

133. “Fate changes when you change your clothes.”

— Amy Tan

134. “God, life changes faster than you think.”

— Amy Tan

135. “And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! 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.”

— Amy Tan

136. “I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child...”

— Amy Tan

137. “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.”

— Amy Tan

138. “How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently? How can you think everyone can be a hero, choosing death, when it is part of our nature to let go of brave thoughts at the last moment and cling to hope and life?”

— Amy Tan

139. “If you asked me how I felt when they told me I would marry Wen Fu, I can say only this: It was like being told I had won a big prize. And it was also like being told my head was going to be chopped off. Something between those two feelings.”

— Amy Tan

140. “We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.”

— Amy Tan

141. “You are beauty, we are beauty, we are divine, unchanged by time.”

— Amy Tan

142. “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

143. “And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.”

— Amy Tan

144. “And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can’t see her face. “Fallen down,” she says simply. She doesn’t apologize. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. “I knew it would happen.” “Then why you don’t stop it?” asks my mother. And it’s such a simple question.”

— Amy Tan

145. “So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”

— Amy Tan

146. “And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.”

— Amy Tan

147. “I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan.”

— Amy Tan

148. “A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away.”

— Amy Tan

149. “My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didnt always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.”

— Amy Tan

150. “A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he’s just another bird drinking from your misery.”

— Amy Tan