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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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Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Everything
Applied
Like
Wood
World
Bright
Woods
False
Paint
Society
Living
Rotten

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A mother is always the beggining. She is how things begin.
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I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.
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My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.
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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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With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more.
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Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.
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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
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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?
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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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.
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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.
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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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Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
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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.
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Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
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We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
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Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.
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If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?
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I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
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