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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.

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
Care
Doctors
Would
Parents
Time
Told
Pianist
Parent
Spare
Sort
Concert
Taken
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Concerts
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Doctor

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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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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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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.
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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.
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I thought this man had long ago drained everything from my heart. But now something strong and bitter flowed and made me feel another emptiness in a place I didn't know was there. I cursed this man aloud so he could hear. You had dog eyes. You jumped and followed whoever called you. Now you chase your own tail.
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I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.
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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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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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I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.
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I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
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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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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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I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary we did not have any books in the house.
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Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.
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too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
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Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
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I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
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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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If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
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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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