Amy Tan Quotes

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

I lost my dad when I was younger, and I know what it's like to lose a beloved parent.

My dad left when I was 3 1/2, and he left my mom and I.

I lost my father was I 10 years old, and I always looked for a father. I missed my father very much.

My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow... he wasn't evil or anything, but he was worthless.

I was raised an orphan... My mother died when I was 2 years old.

My father passed away when I was pretty young. I was 7 years old, and I think when that happens, there are a variety of ways that a young person can react to that loss. I think, for me, it kind of put me in a perpetual state of feeling like something is wrong with me and like I didn't belong, or everybody else had things that I didn't have.

I lost my mom when I was young.

I had a very turbulent and painful childhood, like many people. I left for college when I was 16 years old and up until that point I'd lived in five different family configurations. Each one ended or changed through a death or some terrible loss.

I, personally, have had to rise above my feelings of inferiority to my sister Anjelica, not to mention feeling sorry for myself because I lost my mother so young.

My mother did what many men do. She left.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that's when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt.

We were living in the Slad Road when my father left us. I was about three.

To walk out on a marriage and leave a child was painful.

That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?

My father was gone when I was three years old.

The first thing you should know about me is when I was three years old my mother left me and my father. And that was traumatic obviously for my father - he suffered a nervous breakdown at that time in his life.

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

My father's life was so decimated by his earliest experiences. His mother died when he was 7 years old, which he always said was the worst experience in his life. When he was 8, his father disappeared and he was on his own from the age of 8.

I have a strong memory of the day I was told that my father had a weak heart and that he had to go to the hospital. He died when I was nine years old on the same day that Franklin Roosevelt died; it was his 45th birthday.

I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.

One day, you have a father who's always around, and then the next day, he's gone. I was too young to comprehend that. I actually thought he was going to come back.

I was only a young girl of 13 when my father passed away from a sudden heart attack, leaving us unprepared to take on life without him. We had been protected from life's challenges so far. But without warning, all that changed overnight.

My wife was an excellent mother, her loss has left a big void in my son's life, and those are shoes that I cannot fill. The loss of a parent has not been easy on him.