My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me (Tan is the author of what became The Joy Luck Club).


Amy Tan

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Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
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If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
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In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
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With each passing day, I didn't lose hope. I fought to have more.
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Memory feeds imagination.
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You see what power is - holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!
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At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing a...
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Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This lo...
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Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a...
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When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumst...
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People talk about this 'bucket list': 'I need to go to this country, I need to skydive.&...
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My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was ...
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It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
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I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what ...
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I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of ...
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I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to ...
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There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being ri...
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I write because I know that one day I will die, and thus I should experience as many deliberate obse...
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My grandmother. She's someone I never met, and I would've loved to have met her. She's b...
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I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
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Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, bu...
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I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the sam...
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No one can travel your own road for you; you must travel it for yourself. My faith in this stems fro...
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I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what'...
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Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings...
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God, life changes faster than you think.
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And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant...
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The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in th...
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Saving Fish From Drowning
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Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of a...
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Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with
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I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the sa...
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Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from th...
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I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, ...
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People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's di...
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines. Th...
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When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outs...
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I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sen...
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There is this myth, that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end u...
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My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs sh...
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My breakfast is usually a wholegrain cereal or porridge, with walnuts sprinkled in it, berries, a ta...
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I felt ashamed of being different and ashamed of feeling that way.
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I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be o...
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No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I did...
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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
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I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales a...
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I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried ...
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My mother's openness has remained inspiring to me. I strive to be a skeptic, in the best sense o...
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Mothers have this huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we'...
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The name startled me,
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I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
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Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm nu...
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That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
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I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I h...
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Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.
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What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...

I imagined two peop...
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No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social real...
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Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out...
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Almost every month we have 20 to 30 patients needing a recovery room.
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A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.
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If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I ha...
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Chaos is the penance for leisure.
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That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurti...
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We are the kind of people who obsess over one word, ... but we have only one shot to get it right in...
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I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read - which is to ...
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What should we do?", I asked, and I had a pained feeling I thought was the beginning of love.
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What is the past but what we choose to remember?
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After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
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My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finis...
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Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
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Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing d...
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I learned about opening moves and why it's important to control the center early on; the shortest di...
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Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play che...
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My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianis...
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I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard...
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He has always been politely indifferent. But what's the Chinese word that means indifferent because ...
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I'm usually woken by a vibration on my up-band. It's the gradual vibration for about ten sec...
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For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never h...
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But you can't stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become li...
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old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history
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I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
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Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How ...
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I recognise why I have such a strong inability to forgive certain people who betray me. It's chi...
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And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the d...
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He simply translated what was in LuLing's heart: her better intentions, her hopes.
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I take a few quick sips. "This is really good." And I mean it. I have never tasted tea like this. It...
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To keep false hopes is to prolong misery.
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Where did he go when he left us? I spied the new journal he had started using just last week and hel...
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Fate changes when you change your clothes.
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Teddy once told me that it's natural that we feel alone, and that's because our hearts are different...
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And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusation...
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Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He pra...
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wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her...
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But to pretend that all was right with the world, I first had to know what was wrong.
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We listened patiently to Lester, words skittering out of his mouth like cartoon dogs on fresh-waxed ...
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I ask myself, How can I relax? How can I let go of everything that's happened? You need complete tru...
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Now that our marriage is over, I know what love is. It's a trick on the brain, the adrenal glands re...
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I think about our marriage. The weft of our seventeen years together was so easily torn apart. Our l...
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The next world is 'segregated'? You can go to the World of Yin only if you're Chinese?"
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as to our hopes, our dreams, our secret desires, we couldn't talk about those. They were to vague, t...
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I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul...
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I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise...
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Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak...
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And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I'm cut loose, untet...
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I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul...
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Life's always a big fucking compromise. You don't always get what you want, no matter how smart you ...
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I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can't stop people from wishin...
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A few times I invited Ba to visit me from the World of Yin. But other yin friends tell me he is stuc...
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Being able to restrain my emotions isn’t a great victory—it’s the pitiful proof of lost love.
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. . .the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, ...
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It isn't that i consider them brave, they are reckless, unpredictable, maddeningly unreliable. But l...
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When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can ...
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It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't wan...
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Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it...
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too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
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I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out o...
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I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.
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But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me.
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But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beg...
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The gnarled pine, I would have said, touch it. This is China. Horticulturalists around the world hav...
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The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.
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I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement.
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! want to leverage the creativity of researchers across mathematics, statistics, data mining, comput...
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You don't just wake up one day with dementia or Alzheimer's; these conditions are developmen...
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I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not ...
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Sometimes the British press is maybe a little bit racist.
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Families represent the basic building blocks of our society, and primary care a foundational piece o...
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One day we are a hero, another day we are a zero. Without me, Cardiff would have gone bust. Because ...
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I hope we business people can invest more aggressively outside Metro Manila, whether in real estate,...
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Bitcoin will make a dent in society when more normal transactions occur that would have occurred wit...
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Being right is important. Too many great teams march off saying, 'If we build it, they will come...
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Bitcoin has the potential to destroy credit cards and banks as we know it. Maybe that is a good thin...
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The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts hav...
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First and foremost it's the size, the market cap of these Chinese companies. The magic number here i...
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It can be grueling at times because you have to be meticulous about everything.
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Perhaps our eyes need to be washed by our tears once in a while, so that we can see Life with a clea...
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It's good to have a country like New Zealand which is seen as safe, sophisticated, no real issues, u...
ALEX TAN
Smile when it hurts most.
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I plan to work my utmost for Singaporeans, whatever be their political affiliation. The presidency i...
TONY TAN
Even the accomplished suffers setbacks sometimes. The more bitter the lessons, the greater the succe...
LUCIO TAN
Our understanding of the human brain can be dramatically accelerated if we collect and share researc...
TAN LE
Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.
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Singapore is a natural gateway for international firms looking to access Asia and for Asian business...
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In Asia, red is the colour of joy; red is the colour of festivities and of celebration. In Chinese c...
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The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative ac...
SHAUN TAN
It is okay to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene - and not just okay, but something ...
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You're a hero one day, you're a villain another day. They say that's football. When a ma...
VINCENT TAN
Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.
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To ensure that Singaporeans can take advantage of opportunities, the government should continue to m...
TONY TAN
Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.
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I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there ...
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I would be able to provide a different perspective and act independently of the Government in the de...
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Di mana pun dia berada. Dan kuharap dia tahu bahwa selama aku masih bernafas, aku akan selalu mencin...
ILANA TAN
Much as I would like to give out as much as I can, I do recognize that my resources are not unlimite...
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Fire can benefit, but also destroy. Media will corrupt but will also inform. Food is needed, yet it ...
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Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.
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I feel happy when I look at my grandson, who is 10 months old. That relaxes me.
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We can work together to produce better footballers for both FK Sarajevo and maybe Cardiff City and m...
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I wear sunglasses because of the glare of the spotlights. I wear gloves because it is very cold in t...
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Apart from boosting our long-term economic strength like other Asian economic powers, Philippine com...
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There are people in my life who give me comfort when the going gets tough, as it invariably does. I ...
ALEX TAN
Whatever initiatives we launch, we must always put the interests of Singaporeans and Singapore first...
TONY TAN
The objective of the plan is to give more flexibility to banks to provide services to their clients ...
ROGER TAN
Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure scie...
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The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing i...
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By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal - if I had to give up one thing, it would...
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Every clinical encounter is an opportunity to generate social capital. Even in situations where pati...
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I was surprised to find that the queen is actually a very friendly person. I felt very relaxed aroun...
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Massage is very important for relaxing.
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One day she felt weak and was admitted but the doctors found nothing wrong with her. Still, she was ...
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I picked this theme because children nowadays don't play such games anymore. I want to highlight to ...
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One way to mitigate our risk is to invest in companies with understandable business models.
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The start of the repatriation season is slow, as some 15 Afghan families comprising about 75 individ...
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I've been in other close games, but not in one with a shot like Andrew's.
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We got a little over excited at times. I can't ask for any more effort. They really played hard.
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The textbook is kind of more bland.
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I love football now. I have a club in Sarajevo, and I love that. The fans are fantastic. The people ...
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We missed far too many chances and gave away soft goals in the match. We will now complete the class...
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Effort and consistency are the foundation to success.
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ARM's partnership with Grace is an important addition to our continued commitment and support for ou...
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We spend our lives trying to find, this abstract being that we can call “mine”. We lose ourselve...
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My friend Markus Zusak wrote a story from the point of view of death, 'The Book Thief.' I th...
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Over and over again, like clockwork, we see the human race present a remarkable talent all throughou...
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Have you ever wondered why Cinderella's stepmother was bitter and greedy? Have you ever wondered why...
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Through the outreach that I have done, through platforms, I hope to unify Singaporeans because at th...
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There's still a very positive yield story for Indonesia. There's been strong buying of bonds and tha...
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We have developed our own approach towards rehabilitating people, involving psychological rehabilita...
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The stronger ties between primary care providers and the patients they serve will produce better out...
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I think now we are simply strangers with some memories.
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Asia has a great future; we here in the Philippines will benefit from this Asian prosperity.
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Together, they read on his papers a survey of the most common words found in suicide notes and mass ...
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You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to...
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It's only a very small percentage of creative thinking that ends up connecting with a wider audi...
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Why do I always listen to your insane plans? Why aren't we at home watching TV like everyone else? W...
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Our definition of VIP is not as big as in Macau. But for us, they are VIPs even if they don't sp...
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I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones a...
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