Amy Tan Quotes

I've changed in my sympathies since I've become a mother myself. In high school I went through a period where I was close with my mom and had to break with her in order to find myself and come back. Since that was my experience, that's often what happens in my books.

To the sky, I rise / Spread my wings, and fly / I leave the past behind / And say goodbye to the scared child inside / I sing for freedom, and for love / I look at my reflection / Embrace the woman I've become / The unbreakable lotus in me / I now set free

I love finding things that scare me and doing them. That's how you grow.

Getting on a plane is hard for me, but I do it, because travel is vital to me.

It's that beautiful thing to love your weaknesses, your insecurities, and then put them all on blast. That's why I started writing, and that's why it was so hard to do it in public.

Only out of great vulnerability do you discover what strength you have. Having a daughter who I love with all my being has helped me mine the source of that strength to previously unknown depths.

In the end, my pursuit of the elusive New York State driver's license became about much more than a divorced woman's learning to drive for the first time.

I resemble the father I once hated.

You don't have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn't know you possessed.

To find the courage to do what I want to do for myself has been hard.

I seek out things that terrify me, like an improv class. I'm terrified of sharks, but I scuba dive. I'm not good at auditioning, but I force myself to do it all the time. I've never met anybody who is fearless, but the more you push against your own boundaries, the easier it becomes to push.

I think that feeling of being thrown into the deep end and doing something you never thought you would accomplish is really powerful.

What I've found is that every time you have that uncertainty, if you face it, walk through it, you grow as an individual and gain confidence.

Failure is ultimately very liberating. Once you come out the other side of it, you just might have faced one of your biggest fears and lived. The other side of failure is a big elimination of fear of failure. Trust me, that is an amazing gift.

I now know that my dreams and my identity are only mutually exclusive if I don't try.

There's always a way to pull back and discredit ourselves, but once you just shut that out and start doing it, you realize things about yourself that you never thought were possible.

I think I learned I'm braver than I think I am.

I'm learning how strong I am, how resilient I am. I'm learning my weaknesses.

You find strength in your moments of weakness.

There is this fine line between presenting to You all of my weakness and thinking that it can't be done. In Your strength, I find my own.

The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother--both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished.

We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter the defeat so that we can know who we are. So that we can see, "Oh, that happened, and I rose. I did get knocked down flat in front of the whole world, and I rose. I didn't run away; I rose right where I'd been knocked down." That's how you get to know yourself.

Leap and grow your wings on the way down

Life isn't much more than a big dig through layers of doubt and fear into new levels of power and potential.

I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.