Pearl S. Buck

“I am mentally bifocal.”

“What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.”

“Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.”

“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 should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.”

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

“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.”

“Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.”

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

“Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.”

“Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.”

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

“Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

“The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between men and women.”

“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.”

“The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”

“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”