Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

All human beings have noses, eyes, arms, legs, hearts, stomachs, and so far as I have been able to

When O-lan saw what he had done she burst out in terror, "You have cut off your life!

And it is quite true that she, with the lambs, do provide me with a comfort I cannot fathom. It is a small comfort, but deep, a mother tie to this earth. I own something more, something alive. I shall have to attach myself by all these small cords lest I be rootless, now that the tap root is gone.

That is what I hate most about this war game. It cuts off communication between peoples. We cannot ask questions and so we cannot get answers.

But the railroads are a new force. No hatred is in their history. They heal the wounds of the past, and they reach toward the future.

women are so strange and their tempers are uncertain, and mothers are the strangest of all, for they see fears and harms about their children where there are no such things.

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

and they looked with coming hatred and with fear upon this young man, saying in their hearts they knew he lied, because they could not believe there was in the whole world a man who would choose an earthen house when he might have a great one.

In these days it never came to Wang the Tiger's mind that his son's dreams might not be his own and he lived for the spring.

But O-Lan returned to the beating of his clothes and when tears dropped slowly and heavily from her eyes she did not put up her hand to wipe them away; only she beat the more steadily with her wooden stick upon the clothes spread over the stone.

There in the silence of her own heart, she prayed the goddess to enlighten her and teach her mercy, and she prayed that Sakota might awaken to the grace of mercy shown her so that life could be saved. Strengthened by her prayers, the

The SOUL of a NATION is found in its PEOPLE.

Yes, you paid money for me, she answered, but that does not make me yours. A human creature cannot be bought whole.

after the ancient ondul fashion.

Mais elle est ainsi, vivant en elle-même, voyant de la beauté où d'autres n'en trouvent point.

She knew that men cannot work as women do, but have the hearts of children always in them

On croirait qu'il y a en elle deux personnes : l'une silencieuse, lointaine, même un peu taciturne, l'autre très gaie, mais d'une gaieté trop forcée pour être de la vraie joie.

She smiled over a heap of flowered summery lawn she had in her lap and threaded her needle again with pink silk.

And then she grew uneasy and full of gloom and thought to herself that if the child were joy yet was it a new gate for sorrow to enter by, too, and so is every child...

Some do it for a good deed for the future, that by saving lives they may get merit in heaven, and some do it for righteousness that men may speak well of them. Nevertheless it is a good deed for whatever reason, and some must do it out of a good heart.

One would have said he was his son's servant rather than his father.

Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy to sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

inquired. She

This country of his was not like some others he had heard of, where only in war was there work enough to be done. He had often sat listening in the tea shop to those who talked of things they had seen in foreign countries, and this he held was a main difference, that in foreign countries war was a business, but here it had never been.