Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

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

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.

"Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve." 'It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth' (Buck, 71).

"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."

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.

For the soul of man is born fresh in every child, and there is an age in every creature, unless he is debased too young, when for a time he sees clearly the difference between truth and falsehood, and hypocrisy infuriates him. He cannot forgive those who should be true and instead are liars. This fury, I believe, is the first cause for revolutions throughout history.

But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.

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

And from that time on the boys were no longer called Elder and Younger, but they were given school names by the old teacher, and this old man, after inquiring into the occupation of their father, erected two names for the sons; for the elder, Nung En, and for the second Nung Wen, and the first word of each name signified one whose wealth is from the earth.

Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love?

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

There was no need to hurry that future — yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?

Hunger makes a thief of any man.