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The life we receive is not always what we choose.

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
Receive
Choose
Always
Life

More quotes by Amy Tan

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We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.
Amy Tan
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After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
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You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally--that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning)
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When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.
Amy Tan
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I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
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I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.
Amy Tan
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...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.
Amy Tan
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If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?
Amy Tan
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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.
Amy Tan
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The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.
Amy Tan
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I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.
Amy Tan
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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
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I've always been a magnet for guilt.
Amy Tan
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But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei
Amy Tan
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But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying
Amy Tan
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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.
Amy Tan
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I felt foolish and tired, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind to discover there was no one there.
Amy Tan
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A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
Amy Tan
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I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.
Amy Tan
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But I don't have anything left inside of me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.
Amy Tan