If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.
– Amy Tan
How can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities
and exact opposites?
– Amy Tan
Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?
– Amy Tan
You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them.
– Amy Tan
Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn
to play chess?
– Amy Tan
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never
change your fate.
– Amy Tan
We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to
prolong what was already unbearable.
– Amy Tan
Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.
– Amy Tan
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
– Amy Tan
Chaos is the penance for leisure.
– Amy Tan
It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
– Amy Tan
You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying.
– Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
– Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all – all the Englishes I grew up with.
– Amy Tan
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
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.
– Amy Tan
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it
imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
– Amy Tan
How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and
done differently?
– Amy Tan
Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving
a story to someone.
– Amy Tan
I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me.
– Amy Tan