Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And they you’ll always be nothing.”

— Amy Tan

304. “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

305. “When there is great suffering, he said, everyone struggles the same. But when there is peace, no one wants to be the same. The rich no longer share. The less rich envy and steal.”

— Amy Tan

306. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Amy Tan

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

323. “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

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

— Amy Tan

325. “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

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

— Amy Tan

327. “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

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

— Amy Tan

329. “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

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

— Amy Tan

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

335. “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

336. “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

337. “Probably jet lag.”

— Amy Tan

338. “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

339. “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

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

— 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. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

350. “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