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No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

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
Considered
Representing
Different
Merely
Distinct
World
Language
Languages
Attached
Social
Societies
Reality
Worlds
Two
Similar
Ever
Labels
Sufficiently
Live

More quotes by Amy Tan

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I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
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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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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
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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
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Too many good things all seem the same after a while.
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Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.
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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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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.
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Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
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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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I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.
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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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Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.
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I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.
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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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Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?
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Your only shame is to have shame.
Amy Tan