Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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.

This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.

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?

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

Body and soul are partners, and neither must desert the other.

We can't stop time, but it will sometimes stand still for love.

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.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

I am always moved, with grateful wonder, by the goodness of people. For the few who are prying or meanly critical, for the very few who rejoice in the grief of others, there are the thousands who are kind. I have come to believe that the natural human heart is good, and I have observed that this goodness is found in all varieties of people, and that it can and does prevail in spite of other corruptions. This human goodness alone provides hope enough for the world.

The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit.

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage — and indeed perhaps more.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.

I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom.