Amy Tan Joy Quotations

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.

I have always known a thing before it happens.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.