Pearl S. Buck Quotes

We must have hope or starve to death.

Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word duty. It is the other side of rights.

The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers.

For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.

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

Once the "what" is decided the "how" always follows. We must not make the "how" an excuse for not facing and accepting the "what."

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.

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

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

When hope is taken away from the people moral degeneration follows swiftly after.

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

We must learn to live with danger, " he now said to Kino. "Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?" Kino asked. "No," his father replied. "I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. It is true that on any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, 'Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak?' " "I don't want to think about such things," Kino said. "it is right for you not to think about them," his father said. "Then do not be afraid. When you are afraid, you are thinking about them all the time. Enjoy life and don not fear death - that is the way of a good Japanese.

Praise out of season or tactlessly bestowed can freeze the heart as much as blame.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

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

Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.

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

The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.She knew she was immortal.

He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.

To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)

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

Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do.

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.

I am comforted by life's stability by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge.

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.

Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so thatwithout the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

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

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.

In this unbelievable universe in which we live there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines reaching into infinity meet somewhere yonder.

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was.

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.

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?

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang Lung

The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.

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

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

Introversion at least if extreme is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated — and turned out to grass.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

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.

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.

The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible-and achieve it generation after generation.

Truth is always exciting. Speak it then life is dull without it.

One faces the future with one's past.

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

Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation.

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

However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness.

Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself