After all, Bao Bomb says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

— Amy Tan

All objects exist in a moment of time.

— Amy Tan

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

— Amy Tan

... A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the ginkgo tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursuing.

— Amy Tan

And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?

— Amy Tan

...and it's ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus's dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.

— Amy Tan

And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving goodbye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving goodbye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying goodbye before I have a chance to know her better.

— Amy Tan

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. Furthermore, they see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

— Amy Tan

A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he's just another bird drinking from your misery.

— Amy Tan

Auntie Anima had cried before she left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich and happy by communist standards. But when she got home, she cried to me that everyone had a palm out, and she was the only one who left with an empty hand.

— Amy Tan