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I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

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
Life
Write
Aliens
Thought
Jazz
Also
Lessons
Firsts
Tried
First
Completely
Take
Fiction
Writing
Playing
Things
Making
Alien

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Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh. -An-mei
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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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I thought this man had long ago drained everything from my heart. But now something strong and bitter flowed and made me feel another emptiness in a place I didn't know was there. I cursed this man aloud so he could hear. You had dog eyes. You jumped and followed whoever called you. Now you chase your own tail.
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Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.
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I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
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Hope is the adrenalin of the soul.
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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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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
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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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I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
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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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It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
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Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
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I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
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I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
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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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For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.
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Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
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