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Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

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
Expectations
Fate
Half
Inattention
Expectation
Shaped

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I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.
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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.
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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.
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Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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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.
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I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.
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My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.
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You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'
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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.
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I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.
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Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
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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.
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
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I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. -Lindo
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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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My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.
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If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.
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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.
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My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
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