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Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!
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
Chinese
Kinds
Daughter
Follow
Two
Kind
Shouted
Mind
Obedient
Daughters
More quotes by Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
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.
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
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.
Amy Tan
But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
Amy Tan
Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
Amy Tan
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.
Amy Tan
I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
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
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
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.
Amy Tan
My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
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
You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
Amy Tan
I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that's true or not, I know the intention was there. Becasue when I want something to happen-or not happen- I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.
Amy Tan
Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
Amy Tan
If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?
Amy Tan