And his voice came from him in a whisper,
Yuan could not for his life say, This man is rich and evil, and this man is poor and good, and so he was spoiled for any cause-making, however great the cause.
You are free when you gain back yourself, Madame Wu said. You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carr...
When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways. Last winter we sold two girls and endured, and this winter, if this one my woman bears is a girl, we will sell...
Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve. 'It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth' (Buck, 71).
Well I know I am ugly and cannot be loved—
Wang Lung, seeing them, was fit to burst with pride at this procession of his goodly sons, who were to continue after him the life of his body;
Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of his earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his...
Times were chosen and appointed. If one forced them, they were wrong.
This is one of the main reasons I wished to come to America. I wished to see with my own heart if it would be different and it is not. Even here in New York, and I understand it is true of every major...
The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members
The days of my youth are past and to a woman full grown a kiss means everything—or nothing.
The Koreans have always been and still are a people of superb creative talents, but King Sejong, in the thirty years of his rule, became a deathless legend.
The Empress Mother said with still more irritation, I cannot understand why we must have a foreign religion here when we have three good religions of our own.
Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself
She rose and washed and dressed herself and braided her hair freshly, and having made her room neat for the day she went into the peach-tree garden. It lay in the silence of the spring morning. Under...
Lucinda’s foolish words stuck in his mind like a flung dagger he could not pull out. They’d be in him always, maybe.
It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could no...
It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.
In these days it never came to Wang the Tiger's mind that his son's dreams might not be his own and he lived for the spring.