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It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

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
Success
Conformity
Rebellion
Attack

More quotes by 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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You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.
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Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.
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And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.
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My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.
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Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls
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We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan
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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.
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When I returned home that day, I saw my life as if I already knew the happy ending of a story. I looked around the house and thought, soon I will no longer have to see these walls and all the unhappiness they keep inside.
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In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
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Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
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Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.
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I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.
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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?
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Your only shame is to have shame.
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I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
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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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How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.
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Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East.
Amy Tan