“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.
-Suyuan”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“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, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.
-Lindo”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“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”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“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, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“Each person is made of five different elements, she told me.
Too much fire and you had a bad temper. That was like my father, whom my mother always critized for his cigarette habit and who always shouted back that she should feel guilty that he didn't let my mother speak her mind.
Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to other people's ideas, unable to stand on your own. This was like my Auntie An-mei.
Too much water and you flowed in too many different directions. like myself.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“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.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“I won't be what I'm not.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. ”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“Your life is what you see in front of you.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. ”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“ wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything.
I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same 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. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.
-Ying Ying”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“Too many good things all seem the same after a while. ”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself.
I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying.
Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me.
-Lindo”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
“If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
Born place: in Oakland, California, The United States
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“So it would be, were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, " They have loved darkness better than light, because their deeds were evil." This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognise the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from The Kingdom of God Is Within You
“If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it’s probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That’s the concept behind statistical significance—it’s the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn’t just random chance.”
― T. Colin Campbell, quote from The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health
“Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such tremendous importance take place that the world is never the same again .... Now's the time to be alive-- to see it happen, to be a part of it. That makes the blood race, and each breath is an adventure.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Belgariad, Vol. 1: Pawn of Prophecy / Queen of Sorcery / Magician's Gambit
“When I'm done sorting out the Unit, Alex and I are going to have a little chat"
"Over my dead body"
"I'm thinking over his dead body.”
― Sarah Alderson, quote from Losing Lila
“Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, quote from Fear and Trembling
Lord of the Abyss
The Psychopath Test:...
Blonde
The First Pillar
Calling Me Home
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