Today marks the birthday of Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973,) American author and winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize and the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Buck was born Pearl Sydenstricker to Presbyterian missionary parents in West Virginia. However, she was raised in Zhenjiang, China, where her family lived in a Chinese community. Buck grew up with Chinese customs and traditions and had a Chinese governess. She wandered through the countryside, enthusiastically absorbed the Chinese culture, and learned to speak Chinese before she learned to speak English.
At age 16, she moved to the United States for college and then returned to China where she got married. Her daughter Carol suffered from a severe developmental disability. While still in China, Buck started writing her first novel before a civil war broke out in 1927. She escaped ten minutes before Communist forces destroyed her home and burned the manuscript for her first novel. When violence spread, some American gunboats rescued Buck. After a year in Japan, she returned to China.
In 1929, on a voyage to America to arrange for Carol’s specialized care, she started writing her first published novel East Wind: West Wind (1930.) It achieved little success.
The following year, she published her best-known novel The Good Earth (1931.) In it, Buck wrote of a Chinese peasant and his selfless wife who struggle to survive a drought and eventually become wealthy landowners. The book portrayed China as timeless, unromantic, earthy, and ordinary—a view that was refreshing to Americans who pictured China as an exotic land. Her description of desire and hope, good and evil, and the cyclical nature of life amidst the protagonists’ desire to thrive against great odds made The Good Earth an international bestseller.
In 1934, Pearl S. Buck bought a farmhouse in the United States and never returned to China. She wrote two sequels to The Good Earth: Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935,) 82 other books, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles, and biographies of both her parents. Her writing spanned a variety of topics including women’s rights, Asian traditions, child-adoption, missionary work, war, and violence. In her later years, Buck was very active in the women’s liberation movement and founded the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States.
Inspirational Quotations by Pearl S. Buck
It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundredth with a beauty.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to earth.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Once the “what” is decided, the “how” always follows. We must not make the “how” an excuse for not facing and accepting the “what”.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
We must have hope or starve to death.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
I love people. I love my family, my children… but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever that dream might be.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)