Top 400 Amy Tan Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Japanese chase-away juice.” And.”

— Amy Tan

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Poor service, bad treatment, no respect – that’s the penalty for not speaking English well in America.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

361. “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

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. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Amy Tan

371. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Amy Tan

377. “It is for her grandmother, for herself, for the little girl who became her mother.”

— Amy Tan

378. “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

379. “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

380. “He should go away and study, let his mind wander freely. Until then, he should not be obeisant in spirit to those who trampled it.”

— Amy Tan

381. “They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person.”

— Amy Tan

382. “My friend, my editor, still had the cancer. Each day she had to cross a terrible chasm, a bottomless hole of not knowing what to hope or believe. I tried to imagine what she saw, but I did not have her perspective.”

— Amy Tan

383. “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

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

— Amy Tan

386. “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

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

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan

389. “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

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

— Amy Tan

391. “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

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

— Amy Tan

393. “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

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

— Amy Tan

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Amy Tan

399. “We could choose what we wanted to believe. However, she added, any student who did not choose to believe in Jesus was a corpse-eating maggot, and when this unbeliever died, she would tumble into the underworld, where her body would be pierced by a bayonet, roasted like a duck, and forced to suffer all kinds of tortures that were worse than what was happening in Manchuria.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Amy Tan