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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.

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
Mean
Intention
Different
Following
Way
Side
Sides
Looking
Means
Another
Also
Intentions

More quotes by Amy Tan

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It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.
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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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It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.
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I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promiise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing... But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother.
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And when I say that is certainly true, that our marriage is over. I know what else she will say: Then you must save it. And even though I know it's hopeless- there's absolutely nothing left to save-I'm afraid if I tell her that, she'll still persuade me to try.
Amy Tan
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It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Amy Tan
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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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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.
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Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
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I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
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From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.
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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We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.
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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My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
Amy Tan
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When I returned home that day, I saw my life as if I already knew the happy ending of a story. I looked around the house and thought, soon I will no longer have to see these walls and all the unhappiness they keep inside.
Amy Tan
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Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
Amy Tan
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Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.
Amy Tan
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That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.
Amy Tan
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I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.
Amy Tan