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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
Place
Remember
Firsts
First
Things
Never
Understanding
Understand
Didn

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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.
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Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.
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In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
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You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
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A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
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And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.
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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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How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
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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.
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Hope is the adrenalin of the soul.
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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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You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
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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 didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
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While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.
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My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
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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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Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
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