Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “It isn’t that i consider them brave, they are reckless, unpredictable, maddeningly unreliable. But like rogue waves and shooting stars, they also add thrills to a life that otherwise would be as regular as the tide, as routine as day passing into night.”

— Amy Tan

202. “And in my family, there were two pillars of beliefs: Christian faith on my father’s side, Chinese fate on my mother’s. Picture these two ideologies as you might the goalposts of a soccer field, faith at one end, fate at the other, and me running between them trying to duck whatever dangerous missile had been launched in the air.”

— Amy Tan

203. “Maybe the kind of love that would comfort me did not exist. Perhaps I expected too much of love and no one existed who could ever meet my unceasing and bottomless need for it.”

— Amy Tan

204. “The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.”

— Amy Tan

205. “I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity.”

— Amy Tan

206. “While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.”

— Amy Tan

207. “Isn’t that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That’s not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.”

— Amy Tan

208. “But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me. -Lindo.”

— Amy Tan

209. “I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them.”

— Amy Tan

210. “Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls.”

— Amy Tan

211. “I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.”

— Amy Tan

212. “Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones. It is extraordinarily faithful in recording the most hideous details, and it will recall them for you in the future with moments that are even only vaguely similar.”

— Amy Tan

213. “I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.”

— Amy Tan

214. “Our meeting each other could not possibly be as random as two leaves from two trees being blown together.”

— Amy Tan

215. “I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn’t realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.”

— Amy Tan

216. “Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.”

— Amy Tan

217. “My mother didn’t teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.”

— Amy Tan

218. “The life we receive is not always what we choose.”

— Amy Tan

219. “Suffer more now, suffer less later.”

— Amy Tan

220. “I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust.”

— Amy Tan

221. “Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.”

— Amy Tan

222. “I asked myself, what is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?”

— Amy Tan

223. “I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.”

— Amy Tan

224. “I was appalled at the idea. Evaporate? Would that happen to me? I wanted to expand, to fill the void, to reclaim all that I had wasted. I wanted to fill the silence with all the words I had not yet spoken.”

— Amy Tan

225. “I’ve always been a magnet for guilt.”

— Amy Tan

226. “Over time, passion wanes, differences don’t.”

— Amy Tan

227. “My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.”

— Amy Tan

228. “If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.”

— Amy Tan

229. “I think about our marriage. The weft of our seventeen years together was so easily torn apart. Our love was as ordinary as the identical welcome mats found in the suburbs we grew up in. The fact that our bodies, our thoughts, our hearts had once moved in rhythm with each other had only fooled us into thinking we were special.”

— Amy Tan

230. “I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author’s sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left...”

— Amy Tan

231. “Hardships can harden even the best person.”

— Amy Tan

232. “When you touch a man’s nostalgia, he is yours.”

— Amy Tan

233. “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.”

— Amy Tan

234. “I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.”

— Amy Tan

235. “And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. 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. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”

— Amy Tan

236. “I felt as if I were running in a labyrinth, chasing after something I could not see yet knew was important. I sensed it was just ahead, and then it would go around a corner, and I would be lost. I would have to decide what to do next, where to go, and what I needed to get out of that confusing place. If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would be nowhere else to go.”

— Amy Tan

237. “I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic’s rationale of relying on proof through fact.”

— Amy Tan

238. “I’m not consciously hiding anything.′ After Ruth said that she wondered whether it was true. Then again, who revealed everything – the irritation, the fears? How tiresome that would be.”

— Amy Tan

239. “Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising.”

— Amy Tan

240. “But to pretend that all was right with the world, I first had to know what was wrong.”

— Amy Tan

241. “But he was so attuned to my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. HE had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had he’d pry away from me like little treasures.”

— Amy Tan

242. “I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer.”

— Amy Tan

243. “The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The.”

— Amy Tan

244. “I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?”

— Amy Tan

245. “Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods.”

— Amy Tan

246. “When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?”

— Amy Tan

247. “Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?”

— Amy Tan

248. “I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.”

— Amy Tan

249. “If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would nowhere else to go.”

— Amy Tan

250. “In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.”

— Amy Tan