Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei
Amy Tan
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Think
Thinking
Tells
Someone
Must
Trying
More quotes by Amy Tan
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
Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
Amy Tan
Memory feeds imagination.
Amy Tan
I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
I have always known a thing before it happens.
Amy Tan
If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei
Amy Tan
There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
Amy Tan
And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
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
For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
Amy Tan
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
Amy Tan
I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
Amy Tan