Amy Tan Quotes

When inward tenderness finds the secret hurt, pain itself will crack the rock and Ah! Let the soul emerge.

Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

There's innate competition, I think, between mothers and daughters - mine no more so than anyone else.

How I saw in her my own true nature. What was beneath my skin. Inside my bones... Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain. This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.

I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts.

Allowing the pain of personal growth to be a crucible of your spirit-the alchemical grail through which the metal of your former self turns into gold-is one of the highest callings of life. Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At midlife we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.

The mother is the early care giver and primary source of identification for all children.... A daughter continues to identify with the mother

I'm urgin all daughters to kiss their mothers with those lips that all that lipstick covers. You never too grown up to miss and hug her.

A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, you are sharing in a certain measure of that cosmic pain, and are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self pity.

My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.

There have been many people for whom limitations, failure, loss, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility and compassion. It made them more real.

But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying

The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.

When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

The essential thing about mothers is that one needs to know that they are there, particularly at that age when, paradoxically, one is trying so hard to break away from parental influence.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

When we really connect to that place of wisdom and strength and understanding, everything becomes easier.

When a mother, as fond mothers will; vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much.

She was like a mother to me...and I betrayed as a daughter will betray her mother and yet, never stop loving her.

From bitter searching of the heart, quickened with passion and with pain we rise to play a greater part this is the faith from which we start.