Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.”

— Amy Tan

252. “Do you know what morals are Violet? They’re other people’s rules. Do you know what a conscience is? Freedom to use your own intelligence to determine what is right or wrong. You possess that freedom and no one can remove it from you.”

— Amy Tan

253. “Among writers, if you don’t have a therapist, it’s like saying you don’t keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It’s a natural accompaniment.”

— Amy Tan

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Amy Tan

259. “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

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

— Amy Tan

261. “Never show a weapon before you have to use it.”

— Amy Tan

262. “I hope you don’t suffer forever from keeping love from your heart.”

— Amy Tan

263. “When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he’s thinking of pulling up roots.”

— Amy Tan

264. “A few times I invited Ba to visit me from the World of Yin. But other yin friends tell me he is stuck somewhere else, a foggy place where people believe their lies are true.”

— Amy Tan

265. “Why did I need to see someone else’s bad luck? To feel glad it was not mine? To scare myself into thinking it still might be?”

— Amy Tan

266. “I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.”

— Amy Tan

267. “The moment is altered as soon as I try to capture it, so for me, it’s impossible.” How true, I thought. Moments are gone as soon as you think about them.”

— Amy Tan

268. “And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I’m cut loose, untethered, not belonging to anything or anybody.”

— Amy Tan

269. “So this is what my mother-in-law taught me: To protect my husband so he would protect me. To fear him and think this was respect.”

— Amy Tan

270. “Auntie had a tongue like hungry scissors eating silk cloth.”

— Amy Tan

271. “And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we’ll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will.”

— Amy Tan

272. “So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy.”

— Amy Tan

273. “Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.”

— Amy Tan

274. “I was returning with myself whole and unbroken – limbs, mind, and spirit. I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance.”

— Amy Tan

275. “A moment is not the same as time.”

— Amy Tan

276. “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.”

— Amy Tan

277. “She loved cooperative vegetables.”

— Amy Tan

278. “The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.”

— Amy Tan

279. “I am crying now, sobbing and laughing at the same time, seeing but not understanding this loyalty to my mother.”

— Amy Tan

280. “I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can’t stop people from wishing.”

— Amy Tan

281. “How to obey parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.”

— Amy Tan

282. “I was like that wife of Kitchen God. Nobody worshipped her either. He got all the excuses. He got all the credit. She was forgotten.”

— Amy Tan

283. “I was born in the year of the Tiger. It was a very bad year to be born, a very good year to be a Tiger.”

— Amy Tan

284. “She said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn’t listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.”

— Amy Tan

285. “Then again, it seemed my mother was always displeased with all her friends, with me, and even with my father. Something was always missing. Something always needed improving. Something was not in balance. This one or that had too much of one element, not enough of another.”

— Amy Tan

286. “In two years’ time, my scar became pale and shinny and I had no memory of my mother. 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

287. “Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only one to judge your own decisions and actions.”

— Amy Tan

288. “Believe me, daughter, there is nothing worse than having your own family member out for revenge.”

— Amy Tan

289. “Could you wrap your arms around me to keep me warm?”

— Amy Tan

290. “My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory. I still remember the first time I felt it.”

— Amy Tan

291. “A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end. I.”

— Amy Tan

292. “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

293. “But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And they you’ll always be nothing.”

— Amy Tan

294. “In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother’s story. 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

295. “When there is great suffering, he said, everyone struggles the same. But when there is peace, no one wants to be the same. The rich no longer share. The less rich envy and steal.”

— Amy Tan

296. “Now you see why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy.”

— Amy Tan

297. “Neglect is a surreptitious slayer of the heart. It has as its accomplice carelessness.”

— Amy Tan

298. “This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Beacuse 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 before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.”

— Amy Tan

299. “I sat down and remembered a saying Old Aunt used to tell me whenever I complained that I had been wrongly accused: “Don’t strike a flea on a tiger’s head.” Don’t settle one trouble only to make a bigger one.”

— Amy Tan

300. “Through trial with death, you discover your power. Through trial, you shed your mortal flesh, layer after layer, until you become who you are supposed to be.”

— Amy Tan