“He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.”

“To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)”

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck”

“Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.”

“Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.”

“This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.”

“There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?”

“For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.”

“Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.”

“To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.”

“One faces the future with one's past.”