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I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

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
Away
Writing
Throw
Seven
Second
Novel
Started
Times

More quotes by Amy Tan

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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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If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
Amy Tan
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That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.
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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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They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.
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I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
Amy Tan
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How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
Amy Tan
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And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose
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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.
Amy Tan
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You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally--that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning)
Amy Tan
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
Amy Tan
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I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Amy Tan
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Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.
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.
Amy Tan
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I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.
Amy Tan
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You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei
Amy Tan
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I AM A PERSON WHO THINKS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE SPIRIT WHEN I WRITE. I THINK ABOUT WHAT CAN'T BE KNOWN AND ONLY IMAGINED. I OFTEN SENSE A SPIRIT OR FORCE OR MEANING BEYOND MYSELF. I LEAVE IT OPEN AS TO WHAT THE SPIRIT IS, BUT I CONTINUE TO MAKE GUESSES.
Amy Tan
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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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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.
Amy Tan
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In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
Amy Tan