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We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

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
Right
Nervous
Paralyzed
Hard
Shots
Practiced
Kind
Hour
Concert
Time
Word
Chords
People
Hours
Vocal
Half
Concerts
Firsts
Obsession
First
Shot
Obsess

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Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of.
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I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
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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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too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
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Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!
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Libraries are the pride of the city.
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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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Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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All objects exist in a moment of time.
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I won't be what I'm not. -Jing-mei
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I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.
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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 always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.
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Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.
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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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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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That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.
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We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.
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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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