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I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.

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
Didn
Expected
Failure
Fear

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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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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 think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
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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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A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he's just another bird drinking from your misery.
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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.
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If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.
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I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.
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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.
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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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Chaos is the penance for leisure.
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My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
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And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
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That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.
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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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Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
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And when I say that is certainly true, that our marriage is over. I know what else she will say: Then you must save it. And even though I know it's hopeless- there's absolutely nothing left to save-I'm afraid if I tell her that, she'll still persuade me to try.
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Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.
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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.
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We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.
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