“I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.”

“I pray I die before they day comes when I do not know if my sons are infants or grandfathers.”

“What on earth was Henry talking about?''His soul. I wonder where he keeps it.”

“But he is only stunned by the unvanquishable difficulty of his existence.”

“Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”

“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.”