Amy Tan Quotes

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

It is a true miracle when a man finally sees himself as his only opposition.

It took me a while to find myself.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

The characters that I'm typically drawn to are sensitive men who are experiencing some sense of identity crisis or growth in their life that they don't know how to overcome.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

In life, there's a ladder sometimes, and maybe at the top, there's a mirror. You take a step up, then maybe three steps down... just because you don't want to face the decloaking in the mirror.

Every movie has the thing it's about, and then, deep down, it has this thing that it's really about. 'Star Wars' is not really about a space opera, action, and the galactic quest. It's about self-doubt.

Basically, when I did 'Infinity' in 1997, I had thoughts in my head that left me with a lot of questions. I've gone to certain personal limits with 'Infinity' that, at the end of it, I think, scared me. And I've made a lot of really kinda bad mistakes as a result of that.

I think, a lot of my career and my life before I went to Sweden, I felt like I was trying to be someone else.

No matter what you do in life, it's always a struggle, to first of all find who you are.

I don't know what to do. I only know that it's taken me years to understand that life was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go in.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

It is impressive to see a person who has been battered by life in many ways, who is torn by a variety of unsolved problems, who may be alienated from many aspects of the self-but who is still fighting, still struggling, still striving to find the path to a fulfilling existence, moved by the wisdom of knowing, "I am more than my problems."

The warrior of light knows that everything around him - his victories, his defeats, his enthusiasm and his despondency - form part of his Good Fight.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

I believe, when in my behavior or in relationships or in the way I react to something, that I'm still dealing with some leftover stuff from my childhood, but the good thing is now, because I have learned so much from the Bible, I can tell when I'm behaving wrong and when I'm not, and it doesn't take me very long to realize that's out of fear, or that's because I was controlled as a child, and I can make a conscious decision to behave the way I know I should behave.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.

There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.