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You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?

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
Without
Consequences
Thing
Fishes
Saving
Intention
Saved
Drowning
Consequence
Pays
Pay
Intentions
Question
Fish

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For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.
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There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.
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My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
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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 started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
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People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.
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That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.
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I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.
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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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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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I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
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What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?... And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside.
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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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To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei
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Shanghainese people are good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality, Shanghai personality becomes part of yours.
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
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Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of.
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How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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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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