Amy Tan Quotes

We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.

If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

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.

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.

Memory feeds imagination.