Amy Tan Quotes

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Disappointment results from the removal of illusion.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

Every time I learn the truth about something, I’m disappointed

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be.

Love is like a card trick. After you know how it works, it's no fun any more.

Hope deceives more men than cunning does.

I was going to say the beginning is the good part, when it's all sparks and sparkles, before they are inevitably unmasked as assholes.

You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause!

When you're not used to comfort and good things to eat, you're intoxicated by them in no time. Truth's only too pleased to leave you. Very little is ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you're not really very keen to keep hold of it.

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.

It is the Land of Truth (enchanted name!), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the true home of illusion, where many a fog bank and ice, that soon melts away, tempt us to believe in new lands, while constantly deceiving the adventurous mariner with vain hopes, and involving him in adventures which he can never leave, yet never bring to an end.

World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps

This phantom world gave you false signs But you turned from the illusion and journeyed to the land of truth.

Misanthropy ariseth from a man trusting another without having sufficient knowledge of his character, and, thinking him to be truthful, sincere, and honourable, finds a little afterwards that he is wicked, faithless, and then he meets with another of the same character. When a man experiences this often, and more particularly from those whom he considered his most dear and best friends, at last, having frequently made a slip, he hates the whole world, and thinks that there is nothing sound at all in any of them.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

What if Park realized that all the things he thought were so mysterious and intriguing about her were actually just … bleak?

Why are you messing with the fantasy? We know about the reality. Don't ruin the fantasy, OK?

Illusions are bound to be shattered

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

People b'lief the world is built so an tellin em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?