To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death. - Pearl S. Buck

You must set forth and find the center of your interest. You are a creator, but you must find your interest and then dedicate yourself to that interest — not to the act of creativity. Merely to want to create will make it impossible for you to do so. You must find an interest greater than yourself — a love, perhaps — and then the power to create will set you on fire.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

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.