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Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess. - Ch. 5

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
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More quotes by Amy Tan

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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
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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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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
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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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With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more.
Amy Tan
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I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?
Amy Tan
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...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.
Amy Tan
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I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually, thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... Come from the South, blow from the wind - poom! - North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.
Amy Tan
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In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
Amy Tan
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Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with
Amy Tan
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
Amy Tan
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I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.
Amy Tan
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Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.
Amy Tan
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So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.
Amy Tan
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We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.
Amy Tan
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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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I have always known a thing before it happens.
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
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Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei
Amy Tan
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Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls
Amy Tan