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
...most mothers kiss and scold together.
The highest civilizations -- the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms -- are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women.
Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction
Upon the profound discontent of the young in every country do I set my faith. I beg you, the young, to be discontented. I pray that you may rebel against what is wrong, not with feeble negative complaining but with strong positive assertion of what is right for all humanity.
The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.
I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women - certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.
you seem to grieve for what is not so ... and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come.
I don't wait for moods - you'd never get anything done if you did.
an artist is always seeking revelation.
The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be.
It is love itself that is important -- the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.
As for inhibitions, I've spent a lifetime developing them, and I don't intend to lose them.
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.
Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.