Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2024 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. “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

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

— Amy Tan

256. “I often reread passages of “Lolita” for its exquisite language. To me, “Lolita” has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life.”

— Amy Tan

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Amy Tan

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

266. “She loved cooperative vegetables.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

269. “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

270. “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

271. “I remind myself that I know the difference between elusion and delusion. It is the separation between desire and belief. I know what separates the past from the present. What lies between then and now, it is but a moment, an easy thing to lose.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

274. “What happened in Nanking, I couldn’t claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.”

— Amy Tan

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “See the gold metal I can now wear. I gave birth to your brothers and then your father gave me these two bracelets. Then I had you. And every few years, when I have a little extra money, I buy another bracelet. I know what I’m worth. They’re always twenty-four carats, all genuine.”

— Amy Tan

283. “She didn’t understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger.”

— Amy Tan

284. “Remember that envy is one of mankind’s greatest flaws. It leads to recklessness in the one who envies and possessiveness in the one who has you by his side.”

— Amy Tan

285. “But you can’t stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.”

— Amy Tan

286. “When something that violent hits you, you can’t help but lose your balance and fall. And after you pick yourself up, you realize you can’t trust anybody to save you – not your husband, not your mother, not God. So what can you do to stop yourself from tilting and falling all over again?”

— Amy Tan

287. “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? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wing. I couldn’t see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused men to yelp and dance.”

— Amy Tan

288. “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.”

— Amy Tan

289. “Turn around then and lean against that boulder with your bottom facing me. I’ll enter you from behind. Are you damp yet?” In.”

— Amy Tan

290. “I now lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see it, they could not yank me out of it.”

— Amy Tan

291. “Hugging and being hugged by everybody in moments of sadness and triumph, because hugging is something that never came naturally to me, and now it does.”

— Amy Tan

292. “All this talk of oblivion, of wanting nothing and becoming nobody, seems rather contradictory from a Buddhist sense. The Buddha did all this himself and he became so much a nobody that he became famous, the biggest nobody of them all. And he will never disappear, because fame has made him immortal. But I do admire him for his attitude and discipline. He was a good Indian son.”

— Amy Tan

293. “But my father’s faith, as I said, was absolute. Through God’s prayer he could be granted exactly what he wanted.”

— Amy Tan

294. “But my main motivation is fear of regret.”

— Amy Tan

295. “I have a sense of my life as a percentage of what has been used and what is likely left. And I get impatient now when I waste time trying to find lost things or doing mundane chores, when I dwell on the unpleasant, when I give my mind to it. So I will kill those moments, banish them, and try to find the moments that can be relived. That’s the role of the imagination. It’s like reassembling what has happened, yet it’s still inaccurate.”

— Amy Tan

296. “But your thoughts and emotions after death are no different from what they were when you were alive, I suppose. You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.”

— Amy Tan

297. “My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English.”

— Amy Tan

298. “We both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bend toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other and kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.”

— Amy Tan

299. “No puedes tener suerte cuando otra persona tiene habilidad.”

— Amy Tan

300. “My mother named me Violet after a tiny flower she loved as a girl growing up in San Francisco, a city I have seen only in postcards. I grew to hate my name. The courtesans pronounced it like the Shanghainese word vyau-la – what you said when you wanted to get rid of something. “Vyau-la! Vyau-la!” greeted me everywhere.”

— Amy Tan