Amy Tan Quotes

I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

Imagine how you’d feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn’t stand.

But when you dwell in a house you mislike, you will look out of a window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.

Discontent is like ink poured into water, which fills the whole fountain full of blackness.

The human being is constantly torn from calm and peace of simple existence by two things; wanting what you don't have, or disliking what you have.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

The hemulen woke up slowly and recognised himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know.

Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes.

Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.

Complaining is the favorite pastime of millions.

Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.

That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

I could be going through something in my life that I might not want to talk about in my music because my music is the way that I escape some of those things.

The girl in the mirror wasn't who I wanted to be and her life wasn't the one I wanted to have.

What we don't recognize is that holding onto resentment is like holding onto your breath. You'll soon start to suffocate.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.

Simmering resentment saps energy.