Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

You must set forth and find the center of your interest. You are a creator, but you must find your interest and then dedicate yourself to that interest—not to the act of creativity. Merely to want to create will make it impossible for you to do so. You must find an interest greater than yourself—a love, perhaps—and then the power to create will set you on fire.

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

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

When foreigners come into a nation, the best way is to make them no longer foreign. That is to say, let us marry our young together and let there be children. War is costly, love is cheap.

To repay evil with kindness is the proof of a good man; a superior man blames himself, a common man blames others.

Do not test the measure of his love for you by the way he expresses his body's heat. He is not thinking of you at those times. He is thinking of himself.

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated — and turned out to grass.

And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up

Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve. 'It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth' (Buck, 71).

Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

If life were known one moment ahead, how could it be endured?

Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.

I would ask my teacher a question, Yehonala said. Ask, Lady Miao replied. She was brushing fine quick strokes upon a large sheet of paper spread upon a square table which the eunuch had brought to her side. When may I paint a picture of my own? Yehonala asked. Her teacher held her hand poised for an instant and cast a sidelong look from her narrowed eyes. When I can no longer command you.

I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom.

This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck

None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them ... 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.

Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever.