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No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

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
Family
Discouragement
Didn
Literary
Think
Encouragement
Thinking
Meant
Anybody
Reader
Fiction
Knew

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If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.
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We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.
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My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didnt always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
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My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
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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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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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Chaos is the penance for leisure.
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To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei
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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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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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how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?
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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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Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of.
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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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Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
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My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
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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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I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
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You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei
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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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