Quote

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.

Amy Tan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Laughing
Imagination
Wonder
Came
Call
Wondering
Ideas
Wherever
Find
Suppose
Would
Grateful

More quotes by Amy Tan

Image
I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.
Amy Tan
Image
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.
Amy Tan
Image
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Amy Tan
Image
You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
Amy Tan
Image
Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
Amy Tan
Image
That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.
Amy Tan
Image
Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.
Amy Tan
Image
But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei
Amy Tan
Image
When I returned home that day, I saw my life as if I already knew the happy ending of a story. I looked around the house and thought, soon I will no longer have to see these walls and all the unhappiness they keep inside.
Amy Tan
Image
You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?
Amy Tan
Image
How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.
Amy Tan
Image
In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
Amy Tan
Image
And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose
Amy Tan
Image
We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.
Amy Tan
Image
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
Amy Tan
Image
I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.
Amy Tan
Image
You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again.
Amy Tan
Image
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
Amy Tan
Image
How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
Amy Tan
Image
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.
Amy Tan