Amy Tan Quotes

When I think about my teenage years, when my parents broke up, and feeling alone and being out of control and having to survive... And then other times when you've had to find your own way... that's always been a dominant theme in what I've done.

When bombing is going on, you see a lot of people screaming around you and you can't do anything if you're small. You just want to break out of that and be strong.

I had to fight hard for everything. I wanted to get out. I want to take my destiny into my own hands and escape the vicious cycle of retaliatory violence. This struggle has shaped who I am to this day.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

I survived this torture which left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.

you never forget your first fall.

It was stupid behaviour. And you take a look at the explosion, and it knocks you down and you wake up every morning and you're scared and you're depressed and sad, and you kind of got to let that knock you down and knock you down.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

I have a different kind of experience than other girls had. I've had to face a lot of different styles and adjust to them. I had to face a lot of bad situations and come back. I've had to fight with my eyes swollen shut and my nose broken and bloody.

The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

Rape is the most humiliating thing that can be done to you; it's the most vulnerable that you can be. But once I realized that, I became a stronger person and faced all my fears.

If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

I had a husband who stayed with me, and small children, and I had no choice but to pull myself together and rebuild a different kind of life. There was no other choice.

If you lived through the shooting of Jaws, you can live through anything.

I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims.

When you lose a parent at ten years old, the world seems like a much scarier place. It makes complete sense to me that I took survival courses when I was a teenager and started going to war zones as a reporter. I didn't ever want to be taken advantage of, and I wanted to be able to take care of those around me.

I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard.

I was 25 when my first husband walked out of the house and left me with a 10-month-old. And a house payment and a car payment. But suffice it to say I have a lot of love in my life.

I don't fear no man. I've had everything done to me.

It wasn't the best childhood, but I did my best to make it good on my end... I didn't let it pull me down.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

Listen, I come from the most screwed-up dysfunctional situation. You've got violence. Police at your house. Your dad's gone. Nowhere to live. I want people to know, if I can make it, anybody can make it.