Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

304. “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

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

— Amy Tan

306. “The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost.”

— Amy Tan

307. “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

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

— Amy Tan

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “Lust leaves you blind long after you’ve lost your mind in bed.”

— Amy Tan

315. “Every Sunday, the Jesus Worshippers asked me, “Do you believe?” I had to say not yet. I wanted to say yes to be polite. But then I would have been lying, and when I died maybe they would come after me and make me pay two kinds of penalty to the foreign devil, one for not believing, another for pretending that I did.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

317. “I remember the day when I finally knew a genuine thought and could follow where it went.”

— Amy Tan

318. “Her mother looked pleased at the prospect of being vital to her daughter’s success. Ruth sighed, relieved yet sad. Why hadn’t she ever asked her mother to make drawings before? She should have done it when her mother’s hand and mind were still steady. It broke her heart to see her mother trying so hard, being so conscientious, so determined to be valuable. Making her mother happy would have been easy all along. LuLing simply wanted to be essential, as a mother should be.”

— Amy Tan

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “Probably jet lag.”

— Amy Tan

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Amy Tan

326. “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

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

— Amy Tan

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Amy Tan

346. “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

347. “Isn’t the past what people remember- who did what, how and why? And what the people remember, isn’t that mostly what they’ve already chosen to believe?”

— Amy Tan

348. “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.”

— Amy Tan

349. “As with all hardships, he took this as yet another test of faith. He almost seemed glad he had been called upon on to endure it. And show how great his faith was. He would pass the test and save his son.”

— Amy Tan

350. “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