“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 the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.”

“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.”