Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

All was well with the land and when all was well with the land then everything was well.

Lucinda's foolish words stuck in his mind like a flung dagger he could not pull out. They'd be in him always, maybe.

Loneliness is only sweet to a man if it rids him of presences irksome and unwanted, and it is no longer sweet when the beloved presences are discovered.

He laughed because he was free.

Day by day beneath the opulence of this city Wang Lung lived in the foundations of poverty upon which it was laid.

This foreign one has no fear of anything in her, although she is not beautiful as the Fourth Lady was beautiful. She does not trouble herself. She accepts as her right the interest of men. She makes no effort to win their glances. She seems to say, "This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.

He had collected from every place where he had hid his little stores of gain and he had borrowed all he could, and he could not even have had this except by bitter, frugal living.

Heaven in its mercy says when a woman is forty, 'Now, poor soul and body, the rest of your life you shall have for yourself. You have divided yourself again and again, and now take what is left and make yourself whole again

She is tired to the heart," Ying muttered. "She is tired because in this great house all feed on her, like suckling children.

At that hour of deep loathing she was healed of all her heat and youth, and she was young no more.

In her mind she was comparing it with the face she had seen in this same mirror when she was sixteen.

and when the hour is come that has been set for each of us before ever we can walk or talk, then what need of mourning?

They were called turtle-boats and they were the first iron warships in history.

Now although it is said that lords of war should be subservient in a nation to the civil governors of the people, it is a thing known and proved that the power goes always to the armed man and the man with weapons, and how can a weaponless man, even though he has the right, oppose a man of war in the same region with him, who has soldiers to his command?

The Koreans have always been and still are a people of superb creative talents, but King Sejong, in the thirty years of his rule, became a deathless legend.

To step off the island was to be drowned in the sea.

Even our enemies call him 'great soul,' and declare that they are honored in defeat by such a one.

If it were true that there could be good men among the enemy, then indeed she must still be afraid. If righteous, the white men were stronger than she reckoned, and she kept this fear hidden in her so long as she lived thereafter.

There is no dignity to life except with order

Let no man's heart fail because of Goliath. - David

and when he was weary he lay down upon his land and he slept and the health of the earth spread into his flesh and he was healed of his sickness.

Brave young American men climbed the rugged slopes of Korean mountains and fought in homesickness and desperate weariness for the sake of a people strange to them and for reasons they scarcely understood, even when they yielded up their lives. With such noble impulse and final sacrifice, let the past be forgot, except for what it teaches for the future.

Oh, there is a loneliness which befalls me now and then and it is something more than death.

You ought to hate him, Yuan! Have you not heard what white men have done to our country, and how they hold us hard as any prisoners with their cruel, unjust treaties?