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I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

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
Intelligent
Choice
Expression
Choices
Freedom
Enough
Mind
Make

More quotes by Amy Tan

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A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
Amy Tan
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You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?
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I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?
Amy Tan
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Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
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Over time, passion wanes, differences don't.
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Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.
Amy Tan
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And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.
Amy Tan
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I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.
Amy Tan
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Chaos is the penance for leisure.
Amy Tan
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It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.
Amy Tan
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Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.
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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I was punched breathless by the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer.
Amy Tan
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I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.
Amy Tan
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I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.
Amy Tan
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People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
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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I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.
Amy Tan
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I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. -Lindo
Amy Tan
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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
Amy Tan