Pearl S. Buck citations

Page 2

“Son égale! Mais comment? Ne suis-je pas sa femme? Quel autre que lui pourrait me diriger? N'est-il pas mon maître par la loi?”

“Mais elle est ainsi, vivant en elle-même, voyant de la beauté où d'autres n'en trouvent point.”

“Ton père et le sien, en amis fraternels, jurèrent de s'unir par leurs enfants. Ton fiancé avait alors six ans. Tu naquis dans le cercle de cette année-là. Telle était ta destinée. Tu fus élevée dans ce dessein.”

“[J]e t'ai dressée à te soumettre, de même qu'une fleur subit le soleil et la pluie.”

“Je suis comme un pont fragile, reliant à travers l'infini le passé et le présent. Je serre la main maternelle. Je ne peux pas la laisser échapper, car sans moi ma mère serait seule.”

“On croirait qu'il y a en elle deux personnes : l'une silencieuse, lointaine, même un peu taciturne, l'autre très gaie, mais d'une gaieté trop forcée pour être de la vraie joie.”

“Beaucoup de gens perdent les petites joies dans l'espoir du grand bonheur.”

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old…

- Wang Lung”

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”

“Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.”

“One faces the future with one's past.”

“All things are possible until they are proven impossible.”

“The rich are always afraid.”

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”

“But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?”

“Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmitted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.”

“The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.”

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.”

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.”

“Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

“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.”

“I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.”

“to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe." from Pavilion of Women page 292”

“there is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity.”

“The secret of joy in work is contained in one word — excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”

“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.”

“Life is stronger than death.”

“If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.”

“Did one man write Shui Hu Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape, added to, rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a hand, in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They lived in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and heard, but of themselves they have told nothing.”

“The greatest blow for freedom that was ever struck in the world's history, perhaps, was when Abraham Lincoln decided that the slaves of the South were to be free and he freed them. The South collapsed. The gentlemen who could spend their time fighting, sure of supplies from slave-tended lands, began to starve and go ragged. Their homes began to fall into ruin and their families to be hungry. Their morale was broken. The war was really won by the pen upon the paper which wrote these words, "are and henceforward shall be free."”

“I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.”

“The Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common people. And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them laugh, though laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese novel. I mean amusement in the sense of absorbing and occupying the whole attention of the mind. I mean enlightening that mind by pictures of life and what that life means.”

“Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.”

“I believe with all my heart that jimcrow is wicked and I know that it is a rotten core in our society. I know that we cannot say that we are a full democracy so long as jimcrow exists anywhere in our country. I will fight against it and refuse to countenance it in all was that I can, as long as I live. And yet I know that were all jimcrow laws to be abolished tomorrow, the war for the lberation of mankind would still not be won here. There would still be those not free, not equal.”

“Questions at home and school should be decided in the light of the future. It is a process of toughening, but not the sort of false physical thing that we have called toughening. Our boys and girls ought to know that the bully type, the false "tough," has been the first to break down under the actual fire of battle. The quiet, the calm, the determined have made the best soldiers. Why? Obviously the bully is insecure in himself- he blusters to muster his own courage. Children ought to know that. They ought to be taught to retort to the bully, "You're a coward or you wouldn't make such a noise about being brave. The really brave man simply acts brave- he doesn't have to talk about it."”

“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”