Amy Tan Quotes

I just felt sick. I was actually executing people. I knew it was wrong, and I should have voted against it. But I didn’t.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

Two hands. One to destroy, the other to save. Which had he lost?

Ethan thought he was doing the right thing. He knew it was crazy. And he didn’t want to go, but he had to anyway. Ethan was like that. Even if he was dead. He saved the world, but he shattered mine. What now?

I'm sorry about your face." Jamie looked over his shoulder, and touched the demon's mark crawling along his jaw with the back of his hand. "Sorry about saving all our lives by doing something you had to do?" "Oh no," Nick said blandly. "I just meant, you know. Generally.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

If you want to beat me up, feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself.

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don't.

Parts of you die with every decision you have to make. It becomes about making decisions between bad decisions and worse decisions.

I was sick. I guess I was about to crack up thinking about all my good buddies. They were better men than me and they're not coming back. Much less back to the White House, like me.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

I wanted to get punished, and I took unnecessary punishment when I was fighting.

For a long time, I felt that was actually the best I could ever hope for - to pretend to be a good person - because I was quite the opposite.

When I was in Switzerland, I still had the fantasy I could have saved my parents and family if I'd stayed in Germany. All nonsense. If they had not made the sacrifice to send their only child to Switzerland, I wouldn't be alive.

My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.

Each man kills the things he loves. I recognise that in myself - in relationships, even with guitars - beautiful things that I've had and wilfully destroyed.

Lilt pulled away. "I saw what he was doing, so I cleared a path for him. I helped him do it..." She shook her head, tears tracking the dust off her face, and turned to stare at the fallen tower. "Have we all gone mad to want this?

The fruition of what is unlawful must be followed by remorse. The core sticks in the throat after the apple is eaten, and the sated appetite loathes the interdicted pleasure for which innocence was bartered.

The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on.

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran.

Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

You nearly died today,' he says. 'I almost shot you. Why didn't you shoot me, Tris?' 'I couldn't do that,' I say. 'It would have been like shooting myself.' He looks pained and leans closer to me, so his lips brush mine when he speaks.

What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?