Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “This is beauty, and this is beauty, and you are beauty, and love is beauty and we are beauty. We are divine, unchanged by time.”

— Amy Tan

302. “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

303. “The elements were from my mother’s own version of organic chemistry. Each person is made of five elements, she told me.”

— Amy Tan

304. “With imagined tragedy hovering over us, we became inseparable, two halves creating the whole: yin and yang.”

— Amy Tan

305. “I feed myself with the old grief.”

— Amy Tan

306. “Only Americans think they have rights,” Magic Gourd said. “What laws of heaven give you more rights and allow you to keep them? They are words on paper written by men who make them up and claim them. One day they can blow away, just like that.” She.”

— Amy Tan

307. “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

308. “Religion teaches you that faith takes care of hope. All my hopes are gone, so why do I need faith anymore?”

— Amy Tan

309. “It felt like all the truth got whitewashed with fake happiness,” she said, “only it was not happy and it was worse than fake. It was dangerous.”

— Amy Tan

310. “Praise, I had learned, was temporary. What someone else controlled and doled out to you, and if you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

312. “I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.”

— Amy Tan

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness, the wonder, fear, and loneliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.”

— Amy Tan

317. “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

318. “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

319. “But my main motivation is fear of regret. I worry that if I didn’t go, one day I’d look back and wonder, What if I had?”

— Amy Tan

320. “And once you reached the top, you would be able to see everything and feel such happiness it would be enough to never have worries in your life ever again.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

322. “I realized I am self-centered, that I’m used to thinking about me first. But I also realized that you tend to think about you second. It’s as though I had permission from you to be less responsible. I’m not saying it’s your fault. But you have to learn to take back, grab it when it’s offered. Don’t fight it. Don’t get all tense thinking it’s complicated. Just take it, and if you want to be polite, say thank you.”

— Amy Tan

323. “Most of the girls were like me, the love children of suicides, singsong girls, and unmarried maidens.”

— Amy Tan

324. “I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance I had carried around like my portable vanity with its broken mirror.”

— Amy Tan

325. “Kwan saw what she believed. I saw what I didn’t want to believe.”

— Amy Tan

326. “I know what to avoid, what to worry about. I’m like those kids who live with gunfire going off around them. I don’t want pain. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to see other people around me die. But I don’t have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it’s to know what’s possible to want.”

— Amy Tan

327. “I think about our two faces. I think about my intentions. Which one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other.”

— Amy Tan

328. “How funny to see the foreigner in a farmer’s work hat, like a fish that has put on clothes. Around.”

— Amy Tan

329. “I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.”

— Amy Tan

330. “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

331. “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

332. “Americans don’t really look at one another when talking. They talk to their reflections. They look at others or themselves only when they think nobody is watching. So they never see how they really look. They see themselves smiling without their mouth open, or turned to the side where they cannot see their faults.”

— Amy Tan

333. “Probably jet lag.”

— Amy Tan

334. “I don’t have too many lines ingrained upon my face. I look rather pixieish. Sometimes I wish that as I get older my eyes would become lined and take on more character. It just looks like I haven’t suffered enough in my life.”

— Amy Tan

335. “We could choose what we wanted to believe. However, she added, any student who did not choose to believe in Jesus was a corpse-eating maggot, and when this unbeliever died, she would tumble into the underworld, where her body would be pierced by a bayonet, roasted like a duck, and forced to suffer all kinds of tortures that were worse than what was happening in Manchuria.”

— Amy Tan

336. “He should go away and study, let his mind wander freely. Until then, he should not be obeisant in spirit to those who trampled it.”

— Amy Tan

337. “They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person.”

— Amy Tan

338. “My friend, my editor, still had the cancer. Each day she had to cross a terrible chasm, a bottomless hole of not knowing what to hope or believe. I tried to imagine what she saw, but I did not have her perspective.”

— Amy Tan

339. “Real people don’t learn how to be unselfish... But maybe they can be more self-aware for a second that they are. Or perhaps they are patheticly more unaware. How do you cure somebody of selfishness? Send them to Mother Teresa school? There’s something deep-seated about selfishness.”

— Amy Tan

340. “Poor service, bad treatment, no respect – that’s the penalty for not speaking English well in America.”

— Amy Tan

341. “Lies spread faster than you can catch them.”

— Amy Tan

342. “Absolutely. I remember.” “Funny, I thought you did.” “Ah, you assumed!” He laughed. “Your mother isn’t the only one with memory problems. Well, if I said it, then I was wrong, because I do think it’s important to have certain assumptions – for one thing, that the person who’s with you is there for the long haul, that he’ll take care of you and what comes with you, the whole package, mother and.”

— Amy Tan

343. “I wanted everything for you to be better. I wanted you to have the best circumstances, the best character. I didn’t want you to regret anything. And that’s why I named you Waverly. It was the name of the street we lived on. And I wanted you to think, this is where I belong. But I also knew if I named you after this street, soon you would grow up, leave this place, and take a piece of me with you.”

— Amy Tan

344. “Anyone can have original style,” he countered. “And yet no one truly does. We’re influenced by those who came before us, beginning with the painters thousands of years ago who imitated nature.”

— Amy Tan

345. “It was sad and beautiful knowledge that a person cannot be found elsewhere but in his own spirit.”

— Amy Tan

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan