Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

Be proud of your child, accept him as he is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child has a meaning for you and for all children. You will find a joy you cannot now suspect in fulfilling his life for and with him.

His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.

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

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.

Learn the good that you can of the foreign people and reject the unsuitable.

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

You see how loving kindness conquers fear, even in animals. Let this lesson be engraved upon your hearts.

It is better to live than to die, and peace is better than war, and though there are some who deny this as robbers do, the truth remains what it is.

wept, and in the wrinkles of old people. In the house of the Manchu Bannerman

Well, and every man has his troubles and I must make shift to live with mine as I can

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused. …

No, they were there, these missionaries, to fulfill some spiritual need of their own. It was a noble need, its purposes unselfish, partaking doubtless of that divine need through which God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son for its salvation. But somewhere 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.

It was the secret of her power in this house that she never allowed her will to be felt as absolute. She gave time and the promise of an end, and then she used the time to shape events to her own end.

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.

Had she not created even him? Perhaps for that he never forgave her, but hated her and fought her secretly, and dominated her and oppressed her and kept her locked in houses and her feet bound and her waist tied, and forbade her wages and skills and learning, and widowed her when he was dead, and burned her sometimes to ashes, pretending that it was her faithfulness that did it.

demands the utmost in wisdom, in attack, in endurance. Violence is simple and easy, it is the sword of the stupid and dull-witted, and it always leaves chaos. To carry on a positive revolution without violence—ah, that is a challenge to intelligence!

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

and looked sharply across the street. There was only one house

IT WAS HER FORTIETH birthday. Madame Wu sat before the tilted mirror of her toilet case and looked at her own calm face. In her mind she was comparing it with the face she had seen in this same mirror when she was sixteen.

We were a proud people. We lost our country. Our only hope for return was to keep ourselves a people. The only hope to keep ourselves a people was to keep our common faith in one God, a God of our own. That God has been our country and our nation. In sorrow and wailing and woe for all that we have lost has been our union. And our rabbis have so taught us, generation after generation.

When there were none but these two left in the hall, Wang the Tiger leaned forward out of his carven seat and he said in a hard, hoarse voice, Woman, you are free. Choose where you will go and I will send someone to take you there. And she answered simply, with all the boldness gone out of her, except that she could look at him in the eyes while she said it, I have chosen already. I am your bondswoman.

Peter groaned loudly. Sonia Pan! She's ugly. Mris. Liang would not yield. Ugly girls can be fixed now. It is not like before. And she is very good. She does not waste money. It would be no use for her to waste money on herself, Louise murmured.

but in her everything lasted. She had all she ever had. Everything she had, the home she and Mark had made, his death, Blake's sharp and passionate love to make her know herself a woman, the children—she had all of it forever, to be the rich experience from which she drew her life, her life which was so much more than her mortal

Old One, the tenant said apologetically. It is none of my business and I ought to die, but after all they are the children of your elder brother's son who after all is the first in the next generation after you.