“But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.”

—  Pearl S. Buck

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 208
Context: The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white." by Pearl S. Buck?
Pearl S. Buck photo
Pearl S. Buck95
American writer 1892–1973

Related quotes

William Cobbett photo

“As to politics, we were like the rest of the country people in England; that is to say, we neither knew nor thought any thing about the matter.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Source: Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), P. 21.

Milan Kundera photo

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

“People know what's going on with other people. So, we are wise if we live our lives as if there are no secrets. If we have nothing to hide, then there's nothing for people to discover, and we're clean. Living as if there is no such thing as a secret will keep you from all kinds of pain and suffering, and it will open the door for you to receive God's love more fully. Live as if there is nothing to hide and you will maintain innocence.”

Ted Haggard (1956) American minister

[Haggard, Ted, Letters from Home, Regal Books, March 2003, p. 18, ISBN 0830730583]

Terry Pratchett photo

“We sleepwalk through our lives, because how could we live if we were always this awake?”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

James Woods photo

“Here's what I believe a soul is — at least this, I believe it's at least this. I believe that every kindness that we create in our lives, if it came because we were affected by a person we loved and lost, that person lives through that kindness. That's what a soul is.”

James Woods (1947) American film, stage and television actor

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 11 September 2006

Immanuel Kant photo

“The third of this kind of principles is : matter neither originates nor perishes; all the changes in the world concern form only; a postulate which on the recommendation of common sense has spread through all philosophical schools, not because it is to be taken as having been found so, or as having been demonstrated by arguments a priori, but because if we were to admit that matter itself is fleeting and transitory, nothing at all that is stable and lasting would be left any longer to serve for the explication of phenomena according to universal and perpetual laws, and hence nothing at all would be left for the exercise of the intellect.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

Margaret Atwood photo

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Clifford D. Simak photo

“We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe…”

Clifford D. Simak book A Heritage of Stars

A Heritage of Stars (1977)

“But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,
This which we live behind our unseen faces,
Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither
Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,
For we are incomplete and know no future,
And we are howling or dancing out our souls
In beating syllables before the curtain:
We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

&quot;Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers&quot; http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/print.html?id=171346 <br class="br">Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“We had to fight the Okies because we were Mexicans! It didn’t matter to them that my brother and I were outcasts on our own turf. They’d have laughed if we’d told them that we were easterners. To them we were greasers, spics and niggers. If you lived on the West Side, across from the tracks, and had brown skin, you were a Mexican. Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 78.

Related topics