Home > Work > Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
1 " Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones. It is extraordinarily faithful in recording the most hideous details, and it will recall them for you in the future with moments that are even only vaguely similar. "
― Amy Tan , Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
2 " Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising. "
3 " The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost. "
4 " At several points in the writing, I will realize I have embarked on an impossible task. I will have fewer than a hundred pages, always fewer than a hundred, and they are all bad. I will be seized with paralyzing existential dread that I will never finish this book. Who I was an hour ago no longer exists. This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out. The metaphoric connections have been cut. The wonders are gone. The worst has happened. I am no longer a writer. And then, after another five minutes of self-flagellation, I start writing again. "
5 " once you set up your story, you should step into it and write as if you are living in that fictional dream. The result would be a story that would make readers feel that they, too, were in a seamless story, a dream. "
6 " But in writing fiction, the truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to my nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface. When I set out to write a story, I am feeling my way through a question, often a moral one, and attempting to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums. I don’t want an absolute answer. When writing fiction, I am trying to put down what feels true. Even though the story may not ostensibly be mine, it contains knowledge based on my personal history "
7 " Being forty seems now more tangible. Life signs, like freeway signs, occasionally pop up. I'm getting there and I want to get there faster – without the stops and turns and detours. I want to be forty and have all those forty years behind me. Forty is secure. At forty you are a full-fledged being. Not awkward, not groping, not waiting. It's an arrival point. There's so much that I don't know. So much that I'm not sure of. When will I overcome this feeling that I've been foolish for 24 years? "
8 " I don't have too many lines ingrained upon my face. I look rather pixieish. Sometimes I wish that as I get older my eyes would become lined and take on more character. It just looks like I haven't suffered enough in my life. "
9 " I have a sense of my life as a percentage of what has been used and what is likely left. And I get impatient now when I waste time trying to find lost things or doing mundane chores, when I dwell on the unpleasant, when I give my mind to it. So I will kill those moments, banish them, and try to find the moments that can be relived. That's the role of the imagination. It's like reassembling what has happened, yet it's still inaccurate. "
10 " If I can push out my inhibitions, I will have access to intuitions, "
11 " Age confers this simple wisdom: Don’t expose yourself to malarial mosquitoes. Don’t expose yourself to assholes. As it turns out, throwing away photos of assholes does not remove them from consciousness. Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones. It is extraordinarily faithful in recording the most hideous details, and it will recall them for you in the future with moments that are even only vaguely similar. "
12 " Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story. "
13 " Fear, I think, is the worst element of religions of all kinds. It is used to justify more fear, as well as hatred, lack of compassion, intolerance, and war. "
14 " Praise, I had learned, was temporary. What someone else controlled and doled out to you, and if you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn. "
15 " Real people don't learn how to be unselfish. . But maybe they can be more self-aware for a second that they are. Or perhaps they are patheticly more unaware. How do you cure somebody of selfishness? Send them to Mother Teresa school? There's something deep-seated about selfishness. "
16 " child’s "
17 " As with all hardships, he took this as yet another test of faith. He almost seemed glad he had been called upon on to endure it. And show how great his faith was. He would pass the test and save his son. "
18 " I remind myself that I know the difference between elusion and delusion. It is the separation between desire and belief. I know what separates the past from the present. What lies between then and now, it is but a moment, an easy thing to lose. "
19 " The best metaphors appear unexpectedly out of the deep blue by means of intuition and my infatuation with nuance. "
