Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

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

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away.

People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.