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The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
Amy Tan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.' My mother's version: 'You don't look, you get smash flat like sand dab.' (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.) The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: 'Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.”
“Lack of clarity is a writer's truth.”
“I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.”
“When you are told, "It was meant to be," ask, "Who meant it? What does it really mean?" Is someone trying to make you accept an undesirable situation or one in which you have doubts? When you are told, "Shit happens," remember that plenty of other things happen as well, such as generosity, forgiveness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. When you are told, "It's simply fate," ask yourself, "What is simple about it? What are the alternatives of fate? What is fate's opposite?”
“These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster.”
“In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.”
“By my father's own handwritten definition: "Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.”
“Avoid generalizations. As a fiction writer, I distrust absolute truths, homilies, bromides, sound bites, and also shorthand advice of the sort I’m giving. I like specifics, the longhand version of a story in which it takes four hundred pages to answer a single question about a person’s character. Literary writers, unless they are writing fairly tales, learn early never to have characters who are polar opposites, one “good,” the other “evil.” That’s not believable. People are more than just good and evil. Intelligent readers will demand that you not reduce people to such simplistic terms, or resolve situations with “Good always conquers evil,” “Might is always right,” and so forth. And while such resolutions are common in murder mysteries and action stories, they are feeble in literary fiction, which is supposed to reflect subtle truths about the world. Better to be subtle rather than overbearing, subversive rather than didactic.”
“Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.”
“My father put his life in God's hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen.”
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Book Keywords:
education, humor, english-language, school, truth, funny, autobiography