A Quote by Amy Tan
When my mother read 'The Joy Luck Club', she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.
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The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.
My mother lived her life through movies and books - she read everything there was to read. And she read to me every night. I never went to sleep without her reading to me. And she fantasized about the book and she would talk about it, the place, and you would think that after she read the book and after she told you stories about it, that she had actually been there. I learned about story from her, and I learned the value of a great story, and the value of great characters.
When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there.
One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.
I learnt from Flo how to be mother. Flo was patient, tolerant. She was supportive. She was always there. She was playful. She enjoyed having her babies, as good mothers do.
My mother was a full-time mother. She didn't have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences... everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving - she's better than me.
A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen.
My mother wanted to be a mother. That's the only thing she wanted from the bottom of her heart. She didn't want to be the number one actress - which she was - and she didn't want to be this great legend. All she wanted to be was a mother and she did but God took her away. So I always will empathise and sympathise with women.
My mother was someone that walked into a room and lit it up. She made friends easily and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy. I always wanted to be more like my mother than I am. I loved and admired her very deeply.
I'm not certain, but I have a little gypsy blood in me. And my mother always told me that her grandma could give someone the evil eye, and I'd better not cross her because she had some of that blood in her. Mother always believed that she could predict the future, and she had dreams that came true.
I heard stories from my mother's mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.
I met Gemma, my wife, when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later, she started coming to my concerts, but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was, and that's how it started.
As a child, Kate hat once asked her mother how she would know she was in love. Her mother had said she would know she was in love when she would be willing to give up chocolate forever to be with that person for even an hour. Kate, a dedicated and hopeless chocoholic, had decided right then that she would never fall in love. She had been sure that no male was worth such privation.
My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.
I just feel so blessed to have had the time that I had with my mother. She made it so impactful in terms of how she raised me and my little brother, the values that she instilled in us, the way she inspired us, and how she lived her everyday life.
With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.
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