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I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

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
Different
Fresh
Needs
Saws
Things
Comfortable
Eyes
Eye
Mother
Light
Displaced
Need
Routine

More quotes by 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 love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.
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Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.
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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
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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.
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Shanghainese people are good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality, Shanghai personality becomes part of yours.
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Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
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I have always known a thing before it happens.
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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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To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.
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I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually, thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... Come from the South, blow from the wind - poom! - North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.
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If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
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You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'
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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.
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I did not lose myself all at once.
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With hope, a mind is always free.
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It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Amy Tan
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But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me. -Lindo
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I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Amy Tan