{"author":"Amy Tan","author_id":"Amy+Tan","total_quotes":83,"quotes":[{"text":"You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["fiction","knowledge","memory","remembrance","understanding"],"id":660,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said 'fate' because she couldn't pronounce the 'th' sound in 'faith'.  Could have was hope, and with that I wasn't denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here's where the odds should be placed.I remember the day I started thinking this, it was such a revelation to me. It was the day my mother lost her faith in God. She found that things of unquestioned certainty could never be trusted again. That had brought my parents to America. It had enabled them to have seven children and buy a house in Sunset district with very little money. It had given them the confidence to believe their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that house gods had only benevolent things to report and our ancestors were pleased, that lifetime warranties meant our lucky streak would never break, that all the elements were now in balance, the right amount of wind and water.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["faith","fate","god","luck"],"id":5845,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["language","mother","mother-and-daughter","motherhood","words"],"id":10293,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["life"],"id":25198,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"It felt like all the truth got whitewashed with fake happiness,' she said, 'only it was not happy and it was worse than fake. It was dangerous.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["lies"],"id":26228,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["success","hope","father "],"id":26453,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"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.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["misery","psychiatrists","suffering"],"id":27829,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"Too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["crying","happiness","sadness"],"id":30022,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"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?","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["failure","success"],"id":30269,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["hope"],"id":32978,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":83,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}