Pearl S. Buck
122 quotes
Biography
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and humanitarian. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932, which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
"Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness."
"Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought."
"To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind."
"Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang Lung"
"Love dies only when growth stops."
"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings."
"For the truly creative mind in any field is no more than this — a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him 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. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create — to create — to create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of beauty and meaning his very breath is cut off from him. He must create. He must pour out creation. By some strange unknown pressing inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
"An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell."
"There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are."
"A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated — and turned out to grass."
"Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority."
"Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession."
"Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless."
"Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us."
"I love people. I love my family, my children … but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up."
"All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now."
"One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful."
"What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born."
"[On the Chinese] They are marvellous friends and frightful enemies."
"[On Communism] It's a curious, impossible, impractical scheme of life, not based on anything sound, psychologically.""
"Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break."
"Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked."
"There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place."
"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation."
"I grew up believing that the novel has nothing to do with pure literature. So I was taught by scholars. The art of literature, so I was taught, is something devised by men of learning. Out of the brains of scholars came rules to control the rush of genius, that wild fountain which has its source in deepest life. Genius, great or less, is the spring, and art is the sculptured shape, classical or modern, into which the waters must be forced, if scholars and critics were to be served. But the people of China did not so serve. The waters of the genius of story gushed out as they would, however the natural rocks allowed and the trees persuaded, and only common people came and drank and found rest and pleasure. For the novel in China was the peculiar product of the common people. And it was solely their property."