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

“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.”

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up. ”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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