Amy Tan Quotes

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Imagination comes in after we have experience.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

Memory. My poison, my food.

If you're using your imagination, you tend to look into the past for ideas.

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

We can invent only with memory.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

But how shall I get ideas? ''Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind - Act!

Imagination is a form of seeing

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory