Amy Tan Quotes

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.

Maybe one day I can have a reunion with myself.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

When I went to Munich, I was perhaps a little too young.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

From Bonheur de Vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eighty-two - I have not changed; not in the way my friends mean who want to compliment me, no matter what, on my good health, but because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

I go on the Internet and look at old pictures of myself, because it is the best reminder of how far I have come and where I do not want to be.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

It Might As Well Be Spring... I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.

My lyrics come from my experiences growing up in life, trying to find out and express who I am. That's basically it. I'm not trying to be a prophet or anything like that. I'm just reflecting on life.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.

I didn't know then that I would never be able to leave the sounds and smells of these sights behind me, but I was fiercely conscious of one thing-my ambition.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

'The Waltons' was profoundly important after years of wandering around. I was 44 and cut off from family and friends. It nurtured me back to a sense of family and who I am. It was a transforming experience.

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

Especially on unexpected journeys, you have time; you can figure certain deeper things out, like who you are and what you want. That's why I enjoy journeys.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.