"I thought, 'Bull, why would somebody allow such pain to happen to anybody?' It's so difficult. We don't have words to explain why things happen and you can't couch them in terms like that and explain them at the moment that they happen."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: Amy Tan

• "A lot of bad things have happened in my life. I never believed the sort ..."
• "After a number of years of going crazy over this, I don't read any of ..."
• "All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in ..."
• "Also, because the rhythms, the prose style of the Bible is, of course, very influential, ..."
• "And she said, 'It's not too late; tell the world, tell the world what happened ..."
• "And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which ..."
• "And we have a Constitution, a tradition, a culture that supports that. I hope it ..."
• "Anything that was unreasonable, I said was Chinese so I made the culture the scapegoat. ..."
• "At the time I was doing business writing, I also had a friend who introduced ..."
• "Because they were doing exactly what they loved to do, and what ended up being ..."
• "But there were differences as well. And my sisters, who had grown up thinking that ..."
• "By the time it came to the second book, I was so freaked out, I ..."
• "Certainly all of us have gone through fights with partners in our life, but that's ..."
• "Do things repeat themselves? What in human nature is inherited versus self-determined? All of those ..."
• "For myself, it's very personal. So I have a hard time accepting what is said ..."
• "Getting this story out, I realized, was a gift that she was giving me. And ..."
• "God, life changes faster than you think. "
• "He despaired, and he went into depression and he began to sleep a lot. A ..."
• "History really is a record of behaviors and intentions and actions and consequences. So, I ..."
• "I actually started doing some other kinds of writing before I wrote the fiction. I ..."
• "I also begin to think there are things in life that we don't understand, that ..."
• "I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because ..."
• "I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. ..."
• "I also worry about those who praise my work for what I think are the ..."
• "I always thought philosophy was one of the most useless subjects in the world. It's ..."
• "I ask people now and they say, 'You were a great kid, you were so ..."
• "I could already see how people were treating me differently. That's the scary thing. "
• "I did see all of those things, and even more. I discovered how American I ..."
• "I did some writing in class when I was young just as everybody did. I ..."
• "I did what my father always did. He was a minister. I tried to be ..."
• "I didn't do anything about it for a long time, because, like many people, I ..."
• "I didn't fear failure. I expected failure. "
• "I didn't want to become a suspicious person. Those were the things that helped me ..."
• "I disagreed with him a little bit more forcefully and I said that I get ..."
• "I discovered a sense of finally belonging to a period of history which I never ..."
• "I do look at the photos of myself and see how I age each year, ..."
• "I don't feel the need to be a role model, it's just something that's been ..."
• "I don't know where I got that feeling. Possibly from my father, since he was ..."
• "I don't regret it at all. I grew up in a family that didn't speak ..."
• "I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. "
• "I don't think that necessarily is the case but I think these failures can have ..."
• "I don't think Zoloft's made me a Pollyanna. I can still get angry and upset, ..."
• "I felt very grown up when I was able to read To Kill a Mockingbird. ..."
• "I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the ..."
• "I found out later that he had seduced a young girl, left his wife and ..."
• "I go back to this idea that I only discovered when I was older. I ..."
• "I had a chance, for one thing, to move away and not tell anybody what ..."
• "I had a partner, a business partner, who ended up cheating me, as a matter ..."
• "I had an agent who, by luck, read my stuff in a little magazine and ..."
• "I have a good imagination, but I could never imagine my ancestors having been in ..."
• "I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was. "
• "I just sit by myself, being in my own mind, not being directed at what ..."
• "I kind of forgot about that later. My parents said, 'You're going to be a ..."
• "I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a ..."
• "I look back as an adult now, and I say, 'They only wanted the best ..."
• "I loved all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Little House on the Prairie, Little House ..."
• "I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I ..."
• "I meet writers these days. I remember one who sat at the foot of Thomas ..."
• "I reached a point where I had infuriated my mother so much we nearly killed ..."
• "I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not ..."
• "I realize now that some of the stuff that happened to me was simply the ..."
• "I realize now that the most important thing that is an American Dream - in ..."
• "I realized that - although it was fiction and none of that had ever happened ..."
• "I realized that was the reason for writing fiction. Through that, this subversion of myself, ..."
• "I remember all of my teachers. I think of them all as being very kind ..."
• "I remember once one of my playmates from around the corner died, probably of leukemia. ..."
• "I remember that starting at the age of six I had thoughts of suicide. My ..."
• "I said how I had given 17 cents, which was my entire life savings at ..."
• "I said to myself when I was 17, 'I'm not going to have anything to ..."
• "I said to the woman that I had been thinking of doing some fiction writing ..."
• "I said, 'I'm not really a fiction writer. I don't need an agent. But if ..."
• "I saw in China that she got in arguments with Chinese people. She was just ..."
• "I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You ..."
• "I saw Rachel's hands clasped over her chest, and her face was bloodless, and her ..."
• "I see this all the time in myself. Should I do this? It's just easier ..."
• "I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away. "
• "I still did a lot of things out of anger for a while. I was ..."
• "I still have to think about that over and over again, with everything I do ..."
• "I think a lot about death because of what's happened in my life. And I ..."
• "I think a spirit of generosity and kindness is extremely important. People forget that, in ..."
• "I think any mother worries about her daughter losing herself to some boy and ruining ..."
• "I think I was a gloomy kid. I was trying to behave, trying to be ..."

• "I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who ..."
• "I think of population and the demands on the earth. There are all these people ..."
• "I think self-knowledge is important and that embraces so many things. It means that when ..."
• "I think that I was in the right time and the right place. I met ..."
• "I think that this is a country where that opportunity - to be as wild ..."
• "I think that, in part, also made me a writer, a certain stubborn streak. I'm ..."
• "I think the conflicts were both cultural and generational. They are cultural if you're raised ..."
• "I think the cultural issues can sometimes confuse the generational ones. I'll give you an ..."
• "I think the rebellious side came about because I thought I was never going to ..."
• "I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I ..."
• "I thought it would ruin things, because at that moment in my life I was ..."
• "I thought my life was over then, that all chances of ever going to college ..."
• "I thought the lesson he taught my brother was a total disillusionment about the consequences ..."
• "I took this trip to China as a way of fulfilling a promise. I thought ..."
• "I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't ..."
• "I wanted to bury it so that what I thought was the stronger, more independent, ..."
• "I wanted to see where she had lived, I wanted to see the family members ..."
• "I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing ..."
• "I was at a stage where that kind of criticism didn't dishearten me at all. ..."
• "I was forbidden from reading the Harrad Experiment and also a book called Psychopathia Sexualis, ..."
• "I was in a school in the third grade and they were thinking of skipping ..."
• "I was in kindergarten and there was a little girl who I didn't think was ..."
• "I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom ..."
• "I was nervous about it because it meant three weeks with my mother, and I ..."
• "I was told what I was supposed to do when I was growing up, so ..."
• "I wasn't in love with him when I first met him, but I knew he ..."
• "I welcome criticism when I'm writing my books. I want to become better and better ..."
• "I went through a terrible period of feeling that I had lost my privacy, that ..."
• "I went to a writer's workshop. I met a wonderful writer there named Molly Giles. ..."
• "I worry about that within myself. I worry about the contradictions. I know it's part ..."
• "I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call ..."
• "I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and ..."
• "I wrote about a girl whose parents were educated, were professors at MIT. There was ..."
• "I wrote an essay called 'What the Library Means to Me' when I was eight ..."
• "I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this ..."
• "I'm a very strong advocate for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the danger ..."
• "I'm the worst at coming up with the single word, which is the reason why ..."
• "I've had a lot of death in my life, of people who have been close ..."
• "I've learned that achievement is a sense, what - more importantly - is a sense ..."
• "If it didn't sell a single copy, if it was panned, that whole time I ..."
• "If my parents knew how much I loved reading, I thought they would take it ..."
• "If you blew it - you got a 'D' on something because you stayed up ..."
• "If you get this kind of review then you worry about what's going to happen ..."
• "In fact, one of the subjects I hated the most was history. I thought it ..."
• "In no other country do you have that opportunity. It's not to say that everything ..."
• "It didn't matter to my mother that I was writing fiction, because I still had ..."
• "It is that self-determination of your identity, to define what it means to be an ..."
• "It terrified me when I got to wondering if that was something I really could ..."
• "It took me a long time to get over that, and just finally being able ..."
• "It took me a long time to understand what the American Dream was. I always ..."
• "It was scary to live but it was scarier to die. I remember just saying, ..."
• "It was wonderful going to a country where suddenly the landscape, the geography, the history ..."
• "It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life. "
• "It's a wonderful way to observe life, because so much of life is not simply ..."
• "It's an implied sense of their worth being determined by others. It's a horrible feeling, ..."
• "It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success. "
• "It's fascinating and that makes every life worth living. It makes you see in everybody ..."
• "It's hard to believe, but this feeling changes over time. So many people feel this ..."
• "It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you ..."
• "It's important to understand their motivations, their intentions, where those beliefs derive from and then ..."
• "It's like a little mantra I hear: 'Not interesting, not interesting, not interesting.' I lie ..."
• "It's not as though I came to one crisis, overcame that, and the rest of ..."
• "It's not just some philosophical babble of how things repeat themselves. You see the undercurrents ..."
• "It's not simply material ones or environmental ones. I worry about ethical ones, moral ones, ..."
• "It's only later that you see what the connections might have been and how it ..."
• "It's very gothic to have a little boy killing a giant, somebody's head being served ..."
• "Just be open to it and never let yourself despair that this is it. "
• "Kwan comes strictly from my imagination, from that world of yin that I write about. ..."
• "Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. ..."
• "Molly said, 'If I were you, I would start over again and take each one ..."
• "My books and my stories are about families, so why wouldn't I tell them the ..."
• "My brother was a straight 'A' student, brilliant, was going to graduate at age 16. ..."
• "My husband and I had been married for a long time, we were happy, we ..."
• "My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So ..."
• "My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also ..."
• "My mother wanted to know. Why wasn't my picture in that window? I was very ..."
• "My mother, meanwhile, all the time kept saying, 'Write my true story. That's all you ..."
• "My mother, though, got equally angry at the relative and said, 'For so many years, ..."
• "My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the ..."
• "My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time ..."
• "No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have ..."

• "None of that responsibility crap, 'You owe it to your family. You have to do ..."
• "Not simply each year, but each month - I mean, talk about pressure - to ..."
• "Now, growing up in an American culture, of course, I also had other models. I ..."
• "Oh, my God, here is somebody who is just starting out and it's going to ..."
• "One day, after being told one of these stories didn't work, I thought, 'I'm just ..."
• "One relative felt that the story of my grandmother should not have been revealed. My ..."
• "Other Asian-American writers just shudder when they are compared to me; it really denigrates the ..."
• "People said I was crazy, that I was a workaholic. And I couldn't understand how ..."
• "People will say I've done a great service in helping with generational gaps. I don't ..."
• "Pesticides might have led to leukemia and killed this little girl. My mother had this ..."
• "Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. "
• "Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in ..."
• "Really, what my mother wants is for me to think that what she has to ..."
• "She had no choice in the kind of life she was given because she could ..."
• "She hounded me until I wrote a couple more stories and then she sold that ..."
• "She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' ..."
• "She said, 'Look at this. Here you have a voice, and it's inconsistent with this ..."
• "So he said, 'Cheer up, it's not that bad.' And he threw me on the ..."
• "So I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents. That is ..."
• "So if you were to say to me when I was 17, 'You know, one ..."
• "So, for that entire year, because I had learned all the lessons that year - ..."
• "So, I say, 'If I die, who's going to be waiting for me on the ..."
• "Some of these characters have to be foils. I needed a mother who was kind ..."
• "Some people are going to lose out, but there also might be some compromises made ..."
• "Sometimes I think it's the ghost of my grandmother, the spirit of my grandmother. She ..."
• "Sometimes I think that it's pure luck, I won the lottery. Sometimes I think it's ..."
• "Suddenly I'm hanging around with these people in this environment where I know nothing about ..."
• "Talk about pressure. Here was a little girl who didn't listen to her mother. According ..."
• "That crisis helped me to define what was important for me. It started off with ..."
• "That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, ..."
• "That was what achievement was: the plateaus you always had to maintain, the highest standards, ..."
• "That's what I think life is like, too. I have the luxury to do exactly ..."
• "The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading ..."
• "The hurdles and conflicts are really momentary. You get over them and you see what ..."
• "The new eyes can be very useful in breaking habits of relationships, the old irritations, ..."
• "The other books we had in the house, besides Bibles and medical textbooks of physical ..."
• "The question for me is, 'How am I affected by praise?' I am more fearful ..."
• "The strange thing is, if you ever have a chance to go back to the ..."
• "The success took me by surprise and it frightened me. On the day that there ..."
• "The year after my father and brother died, my mother took us to Europe. And ..."
• "There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is ..."
• "There are so many things but the nice thing about being a writer is if ..."
• "There are so many things I would like to do. I would like to go ..."
• "There is one side of me that wanted to behave and to hear a voice ..."
• "There was no intention - unless there is something subconscious - in trying to depict ..."
• "There's a danger in balkanizing literature, as if it should be read as sociology, or ..."
• "They are not aversive in their actions and, yet they know how to ruffle the ..."
• "They can't change the fact that they made this really stupid mistake, so they are ..."
• "They didn't know who I really was. They didn't know how much the smallest amount ..."
• "They published my little essay and they gave me a transistor radio and, at that ..."
• "They were daughters, also wanting their mother's approval, and didn't understand why their mother was ..."
• "This invisible force that she taught me, this rebellion that I had. And then feeling ..."
• "This is the way it's always going to be. I'm never going to get along ..."
• "This was a moment when I thought for sure my life was over. I think ..."
• "Those are going to be important to the new kind of success. Success being defined ..."
• "To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I ..."
• "Ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of ..."
• "We moved from 41st to 51st to 61st Street and Highland Avenue in Oakland. I ..."
• "We were seated in my parents' bedroom on my parents' bed. And this man, who ..."
• "Well suddenly they were shocked to find this mother saying, 'You didn't cook this long ..."
• "What amazed me was: I wrote about a girl who plays chess and her mother ..."
• "What better gift can I give my mother than to finally sit down and listen ..."
• "What comes to mind is what I think about with my nieces. They are very, ..."
• "What I fear most is taking the criticism too seriously, the negative criticism or the ..."
• "What you'll find ultimately is that this whole question of who you are is a ..."
• "When I look at external success and internal success, I always have to keep those ..."
• "When I was younger, I thought achievement had to do with gaining approval from other ..."
• "When it was discovered that I was reading this, my parents called in the family ..."
• "When people measure their lives in those terms, the passion is there, the self-guidance is ..."
• "When you read about the Civil War, a lot of people, like my husband, can ..."
• "Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from ..."
• "With that sendoff into the world, I was determined to make it as a writer. ..."
• "Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up ..."
• "Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself ..."
• "You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should ..."
• "You don't say, 'Life's not fair, I worked hard for this. I deserve this.' Finding ..."
• "You enter into what one writer, Richard Ford, calls the 'period of existence.' That's when ..."
• "You get distracted. You get opportunities. If I look back ten years ago, fifteen years ..."
• "You know, when people say, 'How has success changed you?' you have to say, 'No. ..."
• "You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for ..."
• "You'll find out how many American assumptions you have and it will give you a ..."