Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.

To repay evil with kindness is the proof of a good man; a superior man blames himself, a common man blames others.

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

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.

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.

It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.

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

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.

The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man's, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity.

To hate another human being is to take a worm into one’s own vitals. It consumes life.

and his voice came from him in a whisper,

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.

A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by reading pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese novelists varied their writing to accompany like music their chosen themes.

The gift he had been given was sometimes heavy to bear, the ability always to understand why the other person was as he was. Wounded, yes, but never angry, and there were times when he longed to feel fierce personal anger.