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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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Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Change
Give
Dreaming
Wells
Inspiring
Well
Fate
Giving
Saying
Never
Stop
Like
Hope
Dream

More quotes by Amy Tan

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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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I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
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I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
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What is a secret wish? It is what you want but cannot ask.
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Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.
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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.
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You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.
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You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -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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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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What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?... And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside.
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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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Too many good things all seem the same after a while.
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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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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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And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.
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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.
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Fate changes when you change your clothes.
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And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
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