Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck
Pearl Sydenstricker Buckwas an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces". She was the first...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 June 1892
CountryUnited States of America
People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them.
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated and turned out to grass.
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.
Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life.
The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.
Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control.
It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.
... [I]n any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.
Believing in gods always causes confusion.
Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.
A knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate...is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. 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.
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.