Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

308. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

311. “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

312. “Probably jet lag.”

— Amy Tan

313. “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

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you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn.”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

315. “Too much happiness, said the man who returned, always overflows into tears of sorrow.”

— Amy Tan

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Amy Tan

321. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Amy Tan

332. “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

333. “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

334. “And so fate – if you can call it that – changed course over the rainforest canopy, and kindnesses and miracles poured like quenching rain after a drought. Such is the nature of happy endings.”

— Amy Tan

335. “You can’t have luck when someone else has skills.”

— Amy Tan

336. “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

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

— Amy Tan

338. “Pero no puedes permanecer en la oscuridad durante mucho tiempo. Algo dentro de ti empieza a desvanecerse y entonces te vuelves como una persona hambrienta, desesperadamente ansiosa de luz.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

346. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

349. “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

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

— Amy Tan