Amy Tan Quotes

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

I think children in general have a very hard time - at least I did - expressing any pain because I didn't want to hurt the people that I loved.

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

I don't know what to say to that, but I have to agree with Johnny that, yeah, we do touch upon things that most men would rather not admit: That we feel pain, we cry, get sad and sometimes don't deal well with disappointment.

Nothing to me is unexpected. No disappointment is unexpected - whether it's movies or people or relationships. I'm always ready for the punch directly between the eyes. So I get hurt, but I never get hurt. Happens all the time.

In my child's-eye view, whenever I was exposed to pain, it meant that my mother had let me down.

As a kid, I would push my shoulders forward in order to hide my heart from being hurt.

I moved around so much when I was younger that I sort of had to have this type of exterior; you know, I was afraid of getting hurt.

There's always going to be something said that hurts you.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

I pretended to be super-cool and not be bothered by things and play off any kind of heartache when I was younger, for sure.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

The heart was made to be broken.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

The best way to not get your heart broken, is pretending you don't have one.

We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.