I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

What is a secret wish?" "It is what you want but cannot ask.

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. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.