Amy Tan Quotes

Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.

Because no one thought she was a person, she had no one to really talk to.

This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

Outside the pale of society, language is just as useless as an eye in darkness

I don't try to communicate with my 'audience'. I don't bother with that any more. I used to try to have conversations with people, but it's futile.

Nobody knows me.

When someone is looking at me, I feel they are looking at someone standing behind me, not at me.

Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.

I lived alone, I didn't know anybody in New York, and I was definitely a recluse. It had been, like, two weeks, and I realized I hadn't said anything. I was laying in bed, and I was like, 'Hello?' I just talked to hear my own voice. And it was such a strange feeling.

I just always assume no one is listening.

But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.

I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of having anything to do with — they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I shoud mention them in my writings & I find more pleasure in wandering the fields then in mixing among my silent neighbours who are insensible of everything but toiling & talking of it & that to no purpose.

You can know the whole world and still feel lost in it.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

I don't belong to anything, nobody's listening to me and I don't have any levers that control my own life.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying Ying

When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

In the end, the only thing between us was silence.

The burden of the incommunicable.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

We're all like the little sailor. From the harbors we hear the strains of accordions and the murky soapy noises of the docks, from the mountains we receive the dish of silence that the shepherds eat, but we don't hear more than our own distances. And what distances without end and without doors and without mountains!

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.