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I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

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
Never
Understanding
Understand
Didn
Place
Remember
Firsts
First
Things

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You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
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My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
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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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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.
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I've always been a magnet for guilt.
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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.
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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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That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.
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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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I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
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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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People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.
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All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying Ying
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And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.
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My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
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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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It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.
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I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.
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A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
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