Amy Tan: The Bonesetters Daughter

One Word Summary: Shooting Star
More Words: Amy Tan is Effortless.
Other Words: Forgiveness, Freedom, Happiness, Love. I love reading Amy Tan's stories. Once I fantasized that I would be writer like her and write a transcendental ghost story. For now it's enough to enjoy her work. And I have my own mother to thank for introducing me to Amy Tan. Thanks mom.

Quotes:

...and sometimes she had to remind herself that teenagers had souls. p21
She wanted to write a novel in the style of Jane Austen, a book of manners about the upper class, a book that had nothing to do with her own life. Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking. p 28

And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin. p. 263

Very Romantic Words:

"There is no curse," he said. I was listening hard, trying to believe that
I would always hear him speak. "And you are brave, you are strong, " he went on.
I wanted to protest that I didn't want to be strong, but I was crying too much
to speak. "You cannot change this," he said. "This is your character."

He kissed my eyes one at a time. "This is beauty, and this is beauty, and
you are beauty, and love is beauty and we are beauty. We are divine unchanged by
time"

Aphoristic Abstruseness*
no matter how neurotic, argumentative, beautiful, talented, depressing all people deserve a mothers love and lover's passion.

*I stole this word combo from Rebecca Solnit