Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
Wept, and in the wrinkles of old people. In the house of the Manchu Bannerman,
The children are waiting for us, she said. Those were her words, but what she really said was that I must live and begin now to live. Death must not interrupt life. There were others waiting for us.
Weak? You must learn to take from a person that which is his best and ignore all else.
Even our enemies call him ‘great soul,’ and declare that they are honored in defeat by such a one.
Day by day beneath the opulence of this city Wang Lung lived in the foundations of poverty upon which it was laid.
He believed that to answer a child’s question before it is asked is to destroy natural curiosity.
Yes, their ancients had taught them that no good man would be a soldier and that the warlike man was the least of men and not to be respected, and so they had all believed.
What is the conscience? It is the most highly developed part of the human being, the core of the spirit, the most sensitive, the most tender.
This seems right to them today and that tomorrow and they do not know that one man’s mind cannot say what is the true right for another. No, in their pride of a little learning they rush out to do evi...
They were prisoners, trapped by old ways of life, jailed within the imperial palace. He was no more free than she was. Yet only she could do what she would. If she said she would be Empress, then none...
The fruit of her life is her grandson who is not yet born.
She shook her head. I don’t know one pretty young man from the other, she declared.
Like most garden lovers, he could never enjoy the perfection of the garden as much as he wished, because his overzealous eye saw always some imperfection, too minute to be noticed by a stranger.
It is the end of a family- when they begin to sell their land. Out of the land we came and into we must go - and if you will hold your land you can live- no one can rob you of land.
Had she not created even him? Perhaps for that he never forgave her, but hated her and fought her secretly, and dominated her and oppressed her and kept her locked in houses and her feet bound and her...
Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do.
But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women.
And as she had learned to do, while she pondered on large things, she acted on small ones.
The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible-and achieve it generation after generation.