Quote

You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.

Amy Tan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Arrogance
Pride
Born

More quotes by Amy Tan

Image
Shanghainese people are good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality, Shanghai personality becomes part of yours.
Amy Tan
Image
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
Amy Tan
Image
For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
Amy Tan
Image
I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.
Amy Tan
Image
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
Amy Tan
Image
I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations.
Amy Tan
Image
You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
Amy Tan
Image
Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East.
Amy Tan
Image
You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'
Amy Tan
Image
Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
Amy Tan
Image
I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
Amy Tan
Image
Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
Amy Tan
Image
Why do you think you are missing something you never had?
Amy Tan
Image
He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.
Amy Tan
Image
And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.
Amy Tan
Image
When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.
Amy Tan
Image
I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
Amy Tan
Image
...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.
Amy Tan
Image
If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei
Amy Tan
Image
Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
Amy Tan