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After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

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
Remember
Choose
Says
Past

More quotes by Amy Tan

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I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
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I have always known a thing before it happens.
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My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
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I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
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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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I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Amy Tan
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You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.
Amy Tan
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Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
Amy Tan
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We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
Amy Tan
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My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didnt always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
Amy Tan
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If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
Amy Tan
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But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei
Amy Tan
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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.
Amy Tan
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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.
Amy Tan
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When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?
Amy Tan
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You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
Amy Tan
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What is a secret wish? It is what you want but cannot ask.
Amy Tan
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Hardships can harden even the best person.
Amy Tan
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The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.
Amy Tan
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He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.
Amy Tan