Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Lies spread faster than you can catch them.”

— Amy Tan

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Amy Tan

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “As a precaution, Ruth had also gnawed over the worst possibilities – brain tumor, Alzheimer’s, stroke – believing this would ensure that it was not these things. History had always proven that she worried for nothing.”

— Amy Tan

369. “I would beat those wings to stay aloft, and when the wind suddenly died or buffeted me around, I would keep beating those strong wings and fly in my own slice of wind.”

— Amy Tan

370. “By then I didn’t have enough feeling left in my body to cry.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

372. “In a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family.”

— Amy Tan

373. “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

374. “Actually, I’m hoping we might have that. A commitment through time, past, present, future... marriage.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

376. “I want us to love each other so deeply we ache with the fullness of it.”

— Amy Tan

377. “Japanese chase-away juice.” And.”

— Amy Tan

378. “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

379. “Ruth believed Wendy made her life more sparkly, but today was not a good time for sparkles.”

— Amy Tan

380. “But why didn’t I flood in the same way? Why was their happiness tenfold what I felt? Did I lack the proper connection between the senses and the heart? And then I realized that this was my habit. To hold back my feelings.”

— Amy Tan

381. “Her mastery of the language was a blissful expression of the spirit to her, like playing a musical instrument.”

— Amy Tan

382. “My thinking is this: Her original mother, she did what she must. I, her in-between mother, I did what I must. That Japanese couple, they also did what they must. One day, this little girl will grow up, and she will be doing what she must. So you see, we all do what we must.”

— Amy Tan

383. “Confucius say a woman is worth a thousand words. Tell your wife she’s used up her total.”

— Amy Tan

384. “Fear, I think, is the worst element of religions of all kinds. It is used to justify more fear, as well as hatred, lack of compassion, intolerance, and war.”

— Amy Tan

385. “She didn’t even pause to think. She simply said in a way that made it clear there was no more to the story: “Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.”

— Amy Tan

386. “What happened to Violet was terrible, and I’m not saying fate happens without blame. But when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.”

— Amy Tan

387. “The hunger in our hearts was instantly filled.”

— Amy Tan

388. “Maybe too many opinions is an American custom. I think Chinese people don’t like to have different opinions at the same time. We believe in one thing, we stick to it for one hundred years, five hundred years. Less confusion that way.”

— Amy Tan

389. “Life was good until the putges came. After that, there was nothing to do except flee into the jungle, high up, where it was so thick only wold things grew. When the putgest stopped Black Spot and his grids and cousin went quietly to the town of Nyang Shwe, where they were not known. They procured black-market identity cards of dead people with good reputations. After that they lived two ways: in the open life of the dead, and in the hidden life of the living.”

— Amy Tan

390. “Mile after mile, all of it familiar, yet not, this distance that separates us, me from my mother.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Amy Tan