Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was an American author and winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize and the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her upbringing and work in China inspired her initial novels, including The Good Earth (1931) and Dragon Seed (1942.)
Buck was born Pearl Sydenstricker to Presbyterian missionary parents in West Virginia. However, she was raised in Zhenjiang, China, where her family lived in a Chinese community. Buck grew up with Chinese customs and traditions and had a Chinese governess. She wandered through the countryside, enthusiastically absorbed the Chinese culture, and learned to speak Chinese before she learned to speak English.
At age 16, Buck moved to the United States for college and then returned to China, where she got married. Her daughter Carol had a severe developmental disability. While still in China, Buck started writing her first novel before the civil war broke out in 1927. She escaped ten minutes before Communist forces destroyed her home and burned the manuscript for her first novel. When violence spread, some American gunboats rescued Buck. After a year in Japan, she returned to China.
In 1929, on a voyage to America to arrange for Carol’s specialized care, she started writing her first published novel East Wind: West Wind (1930.) It achieved little success.
The following year, she published her best-known novel The Good Earth (1931.) In it, Buck wrote of a Chinese peasant and his selfless wife who struggle to survive a drought and eventually become wealthy landowners. The book portrayed China as timeless, unromantic, earthy, and ordinary—a view that was refreshing to Americans who pictured China as an exotic land. Her description of desire and hope, good and evil, and the cyclical nature of life amidst the protagonists’ desire to thrive against great odds made The Good Earth an international bestseller.
In 1934, Buck bought a farmhouse in the United States and never returned to China. She wrote two sequels to The Good Earth: Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935,) 82 other books, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles, and biographies of both her parents. Her writing spanned a variety of topics, including women’s rights, Asian traditions, child-adoption, missionary work, war, and violence. In her later years, Buck was very active in the women’s liberation movement and founded the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Pearl S. Buck
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever that dream might be.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Dreams
What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Children
Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: The Mind, Mind
Hunger makes a thief of any man.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Poverty, Justice
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Freedom, Hope
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Understanding
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.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Marriage, Husbands
Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Debt
Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Nationalism, Nationality, Nation, Nationalities
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Truth
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Pleasure, Age, Aging
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Age, Marriage, Love
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.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Authors & Writing
We must have hope or starve to death.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Aspirations, Hope
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Ideal, Ideals, Hope
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people—no mere father and mother—as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Family
People on the whole are very simpleminded in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than not, the things their leaders tell them.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Understanding
In this unbelievable universe in which we live there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Space
All things are possible until they are proved impossible—even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Possibilities, Health, Optimism, Positive Attitudes
We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Responsibility
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Goals, Possibilities, Action, Youth, Ignorance, Authors & Writing, Time
To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Change
Once the “what” is decided, the “how” always follows. We must not make the “how” an excuse for not facing and accepting the “what”.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Decisions
Don’t wait for moods. You’ll accomplish nothing.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Courage
Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Death, Faith, Nature
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Solitude, Friendship, Living, Success
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Service
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.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Solitude, Self-Knowledge, Identity
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Feelings, Action, Right
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
—Pearl S. Buck
Topics: Creativity
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