Quote

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

Amy Tan

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Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Writing
Extremes
Privilege
Gift
Story
Someone
Stories
Also
Giving
Extreme

More quotes by Amy Tan

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If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
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For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.
Amy Tan
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Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!
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Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
Amy Tan
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I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
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The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.
Amy Tan
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It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.
Amy Tan
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
Amy Tan
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Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with
Amy Tan
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There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.
Amy Tan
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You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
Amy Tan
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Hardships can harden even the best person.
Amy Tan
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I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Amy Tan
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But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.
Amy Tan
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I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
Amy Tan
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And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.
Amy Tan