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I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.

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
Like
Cuba
Florida
Dry
Somewhere
Learn
Didn
Something

More quotes by Amy Tan

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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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You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again.
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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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My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
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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.
Amy Tan
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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.
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To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.
Amy Tan
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You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.
Amy Tan
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When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.
Amy Tan
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
Amy Tan
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Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
Amy Tan
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I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. -Lindo
Amy Tan
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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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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
Amy Tan
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If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei
Amy Tan
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Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind -- poom! -- North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.
Amy Tan
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We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.
Amy Tan
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Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.
Amy Tan
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The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.
Amy Tan
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You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
Amy Tan