Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Amy Tan

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

362. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

367. “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

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

— Amy Tan

369. “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

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

— Amy Tan

371. “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

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

— Amy Tan

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Amy Tan

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

392. “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

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

— Amy Tan

394. “Of cicadas, she would say that they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil... You see, in five ways she could sense the world... But it was always the sixth way, her... sense of importance, that later caused troubles between us. Because her senses led to opinions, and her opinions led to conclusions, and sometimes they were different from mine.”

— Amy Tan

395. “The best metaphors appear unexpectedly out of the deep blue by means of intuition and my infatuation with nuance.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

397. “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

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

— Amy Tan

399. “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

400. “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