Amy Tan

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

“Whenever I'm with my [teenager], I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.”

“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.”

“Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?”

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

“Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the bl...”

“Dementia was like a truth serum.”

“too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.”

“Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?”

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”

“We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our litt...”

“I do not consider myself a religious person, because I don't adhere to a particular religion or faith or prescribed beliefs, as did my father, who was a Baptist minister. And I am not an ath...”

“And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now...”

“She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, o...”

“All objects exist in a moment of time.”

“You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.”

“I was shocked, and I ended up contacting three academics to find out if it could possibly be that my grandmother was a courtesan.”

“I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do...”

“My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.”

“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 ha...”