“I grew up in a double world, the small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world, and there was no communication between them. When I was in the Chinese world I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.”

From My Several Worlds: A Personal Record by Pearl S. Buck
“There should be a deep attachment, heart should be tied to heart between parent and child, for unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment. I loved both my parents but at different times and in different ways. In childhood all my love went to my mother; my love for my mother was a thing apart. It was rooted in my blood and my bones.”

From My Several Worlds: A Personal Record by Pearl S. Buck
“My father suffered the same persecution as did Galileo before him. Nevertheless, he stood stoutly by his convictions and did not yield to persecution. Something of this independence was his gift to me. Thus I have known well the necessity to escape a spiritual prison.”

From For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue by Pearl S. Buck with Theodore F. Harris
“Thus it was from [Mr. Kung] in those days of my early youth that I learned the first axiom of human life, and it is that every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.”

From My Several Worlds: A Personal Record by Pearl S. Buck
“To say that a writer is born, not made, is a truism. Yet I was never a scribbler. Even as a child, I did not write for writing’s sake. I wrote because there was something I wanted to tell—a story, an idea, a feeling. As a young girl I wrote poetry more often then prose. I remember the joy of discovering that sometimes my poetry was good, that it was real.”

From For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue by Pearl S. Buck with Theodore F. Harris
“With work to do and the talent to do it, one can cope with personal loneliness, for talent fulfilled brings the deepest content that an individual can know. One’s first impulse is to assuage the loneliness by establishing relationships of friendship and love. It is a youthful impulse and sooner or later life teaches us that love dies and most friendships change with time. Sometimes it is we ourselves who outgrow the ones we once loved and depended on. If you have three upon whom you can unfailingly count, you are fortunate.”

From For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue by Pearl S. Buck with Theodore F. Harris
“I have an artist’s love of order—order in the cosmic sense. It is disorderly to have children without families, disorderly to permit human beings to be lost. Disorder is destructive, the very composition is unhappy. It seems necessary for me to try to restore order and therefore composition, whether it be of a room or a life. This is happiness.”

From For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue by Pearl S. Buck with Theodore F. Harris
“Indignation is one of the greatest motive energies in creative life—perhaps the greatest. Is love not involved? It is indeed and it is basic, for indignation springs from love, violated—love of a person, love of humanity. Had I not loved children, would their faces have haunted me?”

From For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue by Pearl S. Buck with Theodore F. Harris
"If I am sometimes critical of my own people, it is in excess of love, for I perceive so clearly the need for humanity and our own amazing ability to aid in fulfilling them, that I grow restless with the delays preventing the realization of ourselves and of what we can do, at home and abroad, to create a sensible and pleasant world.”

From My Several Worlds: A Personal Record by Pearl S. Buck
Published 09/15/2004

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