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Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.

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
Secret
Truth
Children
Kettle
Much
Kettles
Boil
Soup
Secrets
Kept

More quotes by Amy Tan

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Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh. -An-mei
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Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.
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I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
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You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
Amy Tan
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You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.
Amy Tan
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God, life changes faster than you think.
Amy Tan
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The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
Amy Tan
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That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.
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Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.
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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.
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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 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
Amy Tan
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Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.
Amy Tan
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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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How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
Amy Tan
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I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
Amy Tan
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Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
Amy Tan
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And when I say that is certainly true, that our marriage is over. I know what else she will say: Then you must save it. And even though I know it's hopeless- there's absolutely nothing left to save-I'm afraid if I tell her that, she'll still persuade me to try.
Amy Tan
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I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.
Amy Tan
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Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
Amy Tan