Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
Amy TanRead
Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the helplessness felt when witnessing a loved one's relationship deteriorate.
In this quote, Amy Tan expresses a poignant moment of vulnerability where a daughter shares the distress of her failing marriage with her mother. It highlights the emotional turmoil that comes with such experiences, where one feels powerless to intervene or mend the situation, illustrating the deep connection and concern within familial relationships.
In practice
In a family gathering, you can share this quote to express the importance of supporting each other through tough times.
Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?
I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Even if I had expected it, even if I had known what I was going to do with my life, it would have knocked the wind out of me. When something that violent hits you, you can't help but lose your balance and fall. And after you pick yourself up, you realize you can't trust anybody to save you- not your husband, not your mother, not God. So what can you do to stop yourself from tilting and falling all over again?
And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.
They had nothing in common but the English language.
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