Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
Amy Tan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising.”
“Real people don't learn how to be unselfish. . But maybe they can be more self-aware for a second that they are. Or perhaps they are patheticly more unaware. How do you cure somebody of selfishness? Send them to Mother Teresa school? There's something deep-seated about selfishness.”
“Praise, I had learned, was temporary. What someone else controlled and doled out to you, and if you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn.”
“Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story.”
“I remind myself that I know the difference between elusion and delusion. It is the separation between desire and belief. I know what separates the past from the present. What lies between then and now, it is but a moment, an easy thing to lose.”
“I have a sense of my life as a percentage of what has been used and what is likely left. And I get impatient now when I waste time trying to find lost things or doing mundane chores, when I dwell on the unpleasant, when I give my mind to it. So I will kill those moments, banish them, and try to find the moments that can be relived. That's the role of the imagination. It's like reassembling what has happened, yet it's still inaccurate.”
“I don't have too many lines ingrained upon my face. I look rather pixieish. Sometimes I wish that as I get older my eyes would become lined and take on more character. It just looks like I haven't suffered enough in my life.”
“Fear, I think, is the worst element of religions of all kinds. It is used to justify more fear, as well as hatred, lack of compassion, intolerance, and war.”
“Being forty seems now more tangible. Life signs, like freeway signs, occasionally pop up. I'm getting there and I want to get there faster – without the stops and turns and detours. I want to be forty and have all those forty years behind me. Forty is secure. At forty you are a full-fledged being. Not awkward, not groping, not waiting. It's an arrival point. There's so much that I don't know. So much that I'm not sure of. When will I overcome this feeling that I've been foolish for 24 years?”
“As with all hardships, he took this as yet another test of faith. He almost seemed glad he had been called upon on to endure it. And show how great his faith was. He would pass the test and save his son.”
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Book Keywords:
writing, faith, memoir
