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?

The speaker frames dreaming not as idle fantasy but as a psychological and moral necessity: dreams generate hope, and hope sustains the belief that one’s life can be altered. The line equates abandoning dreams with surrendering agency—accepting fate as fixed and unchangeable. The rhetorical question (“Isn’t that true?”) presses the listener to assent, turning a personal reflection into a shared ethical claim. In Tan’s fiction, such sentiments often resonate with characters navigating inherited expectations, cultural pressures, and the desire to author their own futures; dreaming becomes a quiet form of resistance against determinism.