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I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
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
Away
Stones
Years
Lose
Way
Loses
Carvings
Love
Face
Rubbed
Ability
Carving
Faces
Washing
Water
Worn
Pain
Stone
More quotes by Amy Tan
I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
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I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.
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I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
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For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.
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You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
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In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
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...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.
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Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
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I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.
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Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
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My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
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Too many good things all seem the same after a while.
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My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
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It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
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