Pearl S. Buck Quotes

Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

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

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

"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."

None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God.

Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.