Al Keller > Al's Quotes

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.”
― Amy Tan

“Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.' My mother's version: 'You don't look, you get smash flat like sand dab.' (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.)

The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: 'Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.”
― Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“Why do you think you are missing something you never had?”
― Amy Tan

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Henry Adams

“Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Sandra to Christie on Matt: So he's been a meanie today has he. The boy's got the subtlety of a brick to the head. I do apologize.”
― Svetlana Chmakova, Dramacon, Vol. 3

“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“Disaster is my muse.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
...On the other hand, he SAID it.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

“The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem'ry of all that --
No, no! They can't take that away from me!”
― Ira Gershwin

“The time to make up your mind about people, is never.”
― Philip Barry, The Philadelphia Story: A Comedy in Three Acts

“Omit needless words.”
― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style; How to Speak and Write Correctly