Pearl S. Buck Quotes

American writer (1892–1973)

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Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker; Chinese: 赛珍珠; Pinyin: Sài Zhēnzhū; 26 June 1892 – 6 March 1973), primarily known as Pearl S. Buck, was a prolific American writer. In 1938, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: John Sedges

Birth Name: Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker

Native Name: Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck Walsh

Alternative Names: Pearl Buck • Pearl Sydenstricker Buck • Pearl Sydenstricker • Sai Zhenzhu • Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck • Pirl Bak

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I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

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?

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that’s where I renew my springs that never dry up.

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.

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

But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?

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

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

"If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!" (Buck, 65)

As for their child, I am moved in two ways. He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and so overcome.

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

"An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell."

(America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938)

there is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity.