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
There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.
What seems new is only new to us.
No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."
To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.
A woman's mind is not an instrument apart from her other being. She does not separate herself as man does, now flesh, now mind, now heart. She is there as one, a unity complete and unified.
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.
Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.
When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.
Love alone could waken love.
The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.
The body was so little a part of him that its final stillness seemed nothing of importance. He was half out of it anyway and death was only a slipping out of it altogether and being at last what he always was, a spirit. We buried the pearly shell upon the mountain top.
For war to man, like childbirth to women, is simplifying in its emotions and activities. All the real problems of life can be put aside while the one thing is done and little thought is needed to do it. ... His hatreds can be expressed without censure, he can let his emotions run free, he can behave as dramatically, as heroically as he likes, and no one laughs at him. It is almost impossible for a man to behave heroically in the cool and ordinary times of peace. But in war anything is allowed him, he is praised and applauded and made much of, as women are excused and allowed for in pregnancy.
The community must assume responsibility for each child within its confines. Not one must be neglected whatever his condition. The community must see that every child gets the advantages and opportunities which are due him as a citizen and as a human being.
There is no beauty without order.