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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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Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Self
Opinions
Think
Determine
Thinking
Identity
People
Difference
Differences
Opinion
Persons
Person

More quotes by Amy Tan

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What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?... And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside.
Amy Tan
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Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.
Amy Tan
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I saw what I had been fighting for: it was for me, a scared child.
Amy Tan
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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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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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I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
Amy Tan
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I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?
Amy Tan
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All objects exist in a moment of time.
Amy Tan
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No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
Amy Tan
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And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose
Amy Tan
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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.
Amy Tan
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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.
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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Too many good things all seem the same after a while.
Amy Tan
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With hope, a mind is always free.
Amy Tan
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For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.
Amy Tan
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
Amy Tan
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I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.
Amy Tan
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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.
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.
Amy Tan