Mother Tongue Amy Tan Important Quotes & Sayings

For those readers who want to do additional reading in the subject, I might suggest starting with the references that are listed at the end of some of the chapters. Here I identify important sources from which I drew much of the information for the chapter in question. These sources often offer theoretical focuses that some readers may find useful or interesting. These sources — Courtney Brown

Look, up in the sky! It's the sky! — John Flansburgh

Amongst the friends of Allah (Awliya), the Qur'an is considered as a love letter from Allah, which inevitably is read continuously to remind them of their Beloved. — Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri

Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not. — Charles Horton Cooley

As it has for America's other indigenous peoples, I believe the United States must fulfill its responsibility to Native Hawaiians. — Daniel Akaka

I firmly believe that life will continually try to teach you the same lesson, with increasing pain, until you heed the call. — Chris Matakas

In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination. A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it. — Edmund Gosse

To attain to the human form must always be a source of joy. And then to undergo continuous transitions, with only the infinite to look forward to: what incomparable bliss is that! — Laozi

But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The way of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning
the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life
a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. — Jed Rubenfeld

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite. — Richard Rohr

She tells me about dreams. She says my dreams are helium and balloons, and I've made the mistake of letting go a few to many times, but I still got this one. Tied around my finger like a wedding ring because even though I don't believe in marriages, I'm gonna bring this one home. — Shane Koyczan

Of all the questions I have asked my readers this is the most important: What would you do if you weren't afraid? When you finally give wings to that answer then you have found your life's purpose. — Shannon L. Alder