Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe.

But is strength comfort for a woman?

Ah well, Liang was her husband and she would never have another. Even had she been young and beautiful she would not have run from man to man as women did nowadays. But she was neither young nor beautiful and she was grateful for Liang. It was honorable to be his wife, and if he had a peevish temper at home, he might have been worse. He had never beaten her, and she had learned, after all these years, how to torture him.

For this Mary's words were not surcharged with oversubtle meaning. No, she spoke them out swiftly and with sharp clearness and each word had its own weight and meaning and no more, good tools of her mind, but not messengers of vague suggestion.

One faces the future with one's past

It is not that we cannot believe," he replied. "It is that we do not want anything enough. Faith rises from necessity. We have no necessity.

Families are only a means of exploitation,' he declared. 'Parents treat children as capital assests and children wait for parents to die so that they will have an unearned income.' 'So children spy on fathers,' Mercy put in, 'and sons are sent far from their parents--' 'That the young may not inherit the prejudices of the old.

As life has proved, it is true that a woman's body is more important than her mind. She alone can create new human creatures. Were it not for her, the race of man would cease to exist. Into her body, as into a chalice, Heaven has put this gift. Her body therefore is inexpressibly precious to man. He is not fulfilled if she does not create. His is the seed, but she alone can bring it to flower and fruit in another being like himself.

Nations, like individuals, can only learn by their own individual experience." Yul-chun

Then the good land did again its healing work and the sun shone on him and healed him and the warm winds of summer wrapped him about with peace.

Man kann die Zeit nicht aufhalten, aber für die Liebe bleibt sie manchmal stehen.

steadily for a few minutes because Leah was so beautiful. She looked at herself in the mirror on her dressing table, and it seemed to her that all

The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.

It seemed so strange, so endless, this turning of some hidden wheel, this passing on of link caught onto link in some never ending chain that she was dazed with thinking of it even dimly, since she was not one to think into the meanings of what passed before her, but only taking all that came for what it was.

But she would not be hastened. Words were to her things to be caught one by one and released with difficulty.

Attachment," Buddha had said, "is the cause of grief.

You cannot be happy unless you understand that life is sad.

But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women.

thing and it could be sold for a heap of silver and sometimes

The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit

I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy.

He had long been her favorite, yet every eunuch knew that the favor of a ruler is less stable than sunlight in early spring. At any moment it can be withdrawn, and as soon can a eunuch's head tumble from his shoulders.

This imperial woman, so diverse and rich in her genius, might have chosen her own greatness had she been able to single one gift above another, but she could not make her own choice of what she loved best to do, and so she did something of each and in all she excelled. As for those affairs of state which had absorbed her until

He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.