Pearl S. Buck

“les gens se sentent seuls quand ils rêvent .”

“It is the highest reward when a writer hears when a book written in doubt and solitude, has reached a human heart with a deeper meaning than even the writer had been aware of, as she wrote. It is something extra, the unexpected return.”

“Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.”

“Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.”

“I would ask my teacher a question," Yehonala said."Ask," Lady Miao replied. She was brushing fine quick strokes upon a large sheet of paper spread upon a square table which the eunuch had brought to her side."When may I paint a picture of my own?" Yehonala asked. Her teacher held her hand poised for an instant and cast a sidelong look from her narrowed eyes. "When I can no longer command you.”

“To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.”

“If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.”

“I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that.”

“It was Wang Lung's marriage day.”

“U meni postoji mjestogdje živim posve sama;tu obnavljam svoja proljećakoja nikad ne presahnu”

“As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.”

“No se puede parar el tiempo, pero para el amor a veces se detiene”

“Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.”

“And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.”

“Is our Heaven your God, and is your God our Heaven?' she inquired.'They are one and the same,' he replied...'There is only one true God. He has many names.''Then anywhere upon the round earth, by whatever seas, those who believe in any God believe in the One?' she asked.'And so are brothers,' he said, agreeing.'And if I do not believe in any?' she inquired willfully.'God is patient,' he said. 'God waits. Is there not eternity?”

“None of us is so much better or wiser than any other than he can destroy a single creature without destroying something of himself.”

“to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe.”

“You are right,” he had said. “Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself.” That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.”

“Had she not created even him? Perhaps for that he never forgave her, but hated her and fought her secretly, and dominated her and oppressed her and kept her locked in houses and her feet bound and her waist tied, and forbade her wages and skills and learning, and widowed her when she was dead, and burned her sometimes to ashes, pretending that it was her faithfulness that did it.”

“You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.”

“French is the most beautiful,” he said, “and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.”

“Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?”

“Nothing is menial where there is love.”

“To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.”

“He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.”

“Life is stronger than death.”

“Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself”

“The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.”

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.”

“I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.”

“None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.”

“It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.”

“I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.”

“Every mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

“If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all. ”

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang Lung”

“Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.”

“Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?”

“But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?”

“there is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity.”

“I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.”

“Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together”

“I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being”

“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.”

“The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members”

“He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.”

“Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.”

“The secret of joy in work is contained in one word-excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”

“Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.”

“Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.”