Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Pearl S. Buck Novelist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Jun 26, 1892
  • Died: Mar 6, 1973

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu, was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. 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."

After her return to the United States in 1935, she continued her prolific writing career, and became a prominent advocate of the rights of women and minority groups, and wrote widely on Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed race adoption.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

One faces the future with one's past.

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between men and women.

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated and turned out to grass.

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then life is dull without it.

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Love alone could waken love.

Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.