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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.

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
Lessons
Female
Teach
Mother
Didn
Strongly
Chinese
Notion

More quotes by Amy Tan

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For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
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I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
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To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei
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I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.
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I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary we did not have any books in the house.
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A mother is always the beggining. She is how things begin.
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Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
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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
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Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.
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Hope is the adrenalin of the soul.
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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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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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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.
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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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Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.
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Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind -- poom! -- North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.
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Hardships can harden even the best person.
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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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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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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