Quotes by Amy Tan

“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.”

“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.”

“In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.”

“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.”

“Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with”

“Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument”

“Whenever Im with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines. The Kitchen Gods Wife”

“People think its a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimers. But in my mothers case, its different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. ... For the first time in her life, shes happy.”

“If you cant change your fate, change your attitude.”

“Saving Fish From Drowning”

If you cant 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 Debbies mom down the block might say, Honey, look both ways before crossing the street. My mothers version: You dont look, you get smash flat like sand dab. (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.)The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: Dont ever let boy kiss you. You do, you cant stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

My mother believed in Gods will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said fate because she couldnt pronounce the th sound in faith. could have was hope, and with that I wasnt denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, heres where the odds should be placed.I remember the day I started thinking this, it was such a revelation to me. It was the day my mother lost her faith in God. She found that things of unquestioned certainty could never be trusted again. that had brought my parents to America. It had enabled them to have seven children and buy a house in Sunset district with very little money. It had given them the confidence to believe their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that house gods had only benevolent things to report and our ancestors were pleased, that lifetime warranties meant our lucky streak would never break, that all the elements were now in balance, the right amount of wind and water.

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

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

Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, thats like saying you can never change your fate. Isnt that true?

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

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.

Its not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable...What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We werent allowed to think a bad thought. 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 thats how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.