Heaven in its mercy says when a woman is forty, ‘Now, poor soul and body, the rest of your life you shall have for yourself. You have divided yourself again and again, and now take what is left and ma...
He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.
But O-Lan returned to the beating of his clothes and when tears dropped slowly and heavily from her eyes she did not put up her hand to wipe them away; only she beat the more steadily with her wooden...
Brave young American men climbed the rugged slopes of Korean mountains and fought in homesickness and desperate weariness for the sake of a people strange to them and for reasons they scarcely underst...
Books, for example—she had thought of books as diversion and amusement. Now she knew they were communication between minds, her own and others, living and dead. Such communication was the source of le...
Body and soul are partners, and neither must desert the other.
And will you understand me when I say I would fight to keep you free from such beliefs because for you they would be false, and at the same time I would fight to keep my mother in those same beliefs b...
And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land.
And from that time on the boys were no longer called Elder and Younger, but they were given school names by the old teacher, and this old man, after inquiring into the occupation of their father, erec...
Ah well, Liang was her husband and she would never have another. Even had she been young and beautiful she would not have run from man to man as women did nowadays. But she was neither young nor beaut...
Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.
Woman
Was not death for which she grieved, but life, life which had carved his mouth into such sorrow and had set hollows underneath his eyes, which had given him dreams of love in his youth and then had ro...
Inquired. She
If one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone.
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 an artist, she said. But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.
When foreigners come into a nation, the best way is to make them no longer foreign. That is to say, let us marry our young together and let there be children. War is costly, love is cheap.
Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve. 'It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth' (Buck, 71).
Well, and every man has his troubles and I must make shift to live with mine as I can,