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Dementia was like a truth serum.

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
Serum
Dementia
Truth
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More quotes by 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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Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
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 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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What is a secret wish? It is what you want but cannot ask.
Amy Tan
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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
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You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?
Amy Tan
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That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.
Amy Tan
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If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?
Amy Tan
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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
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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
Amy Tan
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I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
Amy Tan
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I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.
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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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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I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.
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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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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For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
Amy Tan