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
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.
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.
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.
Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.
Too many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.
Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.
Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.
Love alone could waken love.
For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.
The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.
People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.
The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.
What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.
Iowans know themselves and what they are doing. They are doing well.