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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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I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
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Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
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If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.
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If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei
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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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Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.
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I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
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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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A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
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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 after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
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Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
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To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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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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I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.
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People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
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I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.
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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