Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I feed myself with the old grief.”

— Amy Tan

302. “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

303. “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

304. “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.”

— Amy Tan

305. “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

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

— Amy Tan

307. “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

308. “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you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn.”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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “I looked at her and saw she was crying. And I also began to cry again, that this was our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond.”

— Amy Tan

312. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

315. “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

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

— Amy Tan

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “Probably jet lag.”

— Amy Tan

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown.”

— Amy Tan

327. “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

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

— Amy Tan

329. “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

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

— Amy Tan

331. “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

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

— Amy Tan

333. “Sometimes I feel like I’m a pair of eyes and ears, and I’m just trying to stay safe and make sense of what’s happening. 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

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

— Amy Tan

335. “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

336. “This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate.”

— Amy Tan

337. “And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate alla long, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in control. i found out the most I could have was hope, and with that I was not denying any possibility, good or bad.”

— Amy Tan

338. “And before they ate the last supper of life-ending mushrooms, they would pound the drums and sound the hours. They would ready the souls of their bodies, the soul of the eyes, the soul of the mouths, all of them, one by one. They would know to be ready, to not dillydally and get left behind. Soon the soldiers would arrive. They would stab them with their bayonets, shoot them with their rifles, but they would already be gone, their bodies empty like the hollow husks of the emeralds beetles.”

— Amy Tan

339. “After a while I didn’t think it was a terrible life, no, not really. After a while, I hurt so much I didn’t feel any difference.”

— Amy Tan

340. “We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.”

— Amy Tan

341. “The mind fools the eye. The eye makes us fools.”

— Amy Tan

342. “Look at that. There one family lives, kitchen is in China, bedroom is in Myanmar. In this way, this family eats in one country, sleeps in other. I think this house been standing there for many centuries, yes, long time, before anyone decided where one country stops, the other starts.”

— Amy Tan

343. “Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”

— Amy Tan

344. “Teddy once told me that it’s natural that we feel alone, and that’s because our hearts are different from others and we don’t even know how. When we’re in love, as if by magic, our different hearts come together perfectly toward the same desire. Eventually, the differences return, and then comes heartache and mending, and, in between, much loneliness and fear. If love remains despite the pain of those differences, it must be guarded as rare...”

— Amy Tan

345. “Fate once made you American. Fate took it away.”

— Amy Tan

346. “She was either temperamental, meaning short-tempered and unhappy, or she was melancholy, meaning listless and unhappy.”

— Amy Tan

347. “I resented the easy supposition of all’s well that ends well.”

— Amy Tan

348. “I watch them continue to argue, although perhaps it is not arguing. They are remembering together, dreaming together.”

— Amy Tan

349. “Being forty seems now more tangible. Life signs, like freeway signs, occasionally pop up. I’m getting there and I want to get there faster – without the stops and turns and detours. I want to be forty and have all those forty years behind me. Forty is secure. At forty you are a full-fledged being. Not awkward, not groping, not waiting. It’s an arrival point. There’s so much that I don’t know. So much that I’m not sure of. When will I overcome this feeling that I’ve been foolish for 24 years?”

— Amy Tan

350. “Or maybe he would turn to religion. Many Americans did so when faced with heartache and hardship.”

— Amy Tan