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I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

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
Began
Avoid
Events
Opportunity
Look
Looks
Take
Things
Relevant

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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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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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In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
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Memory feeds imagination.
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Fate changes when you change your clothes.
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I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
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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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A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
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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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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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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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And now I have to stop. Because every time I remember this, I have to cry a little by myself. I don't know why something that made me so happy then feels so sad now. Maybe that is the way it is with the best memories.
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My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
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And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.
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Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
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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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When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.
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We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan
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Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
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I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.
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