Great Throughts Treasury

"The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born."

"The rich are always afraid. "

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them ... 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. "

"The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it. "

"There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream -- whatever that dream might be. "

"There is one word that can be the guide for your life - it is the word reciprocity. "

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

"To know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe. "

"To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium."

"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. "

"We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more."

"What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born."

"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. "

"You are free when you gain back yourself, Madame Wu said. You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free."

"You are right, he had said. Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself. That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love. "

"A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by reading pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese novelists varied their writing to accompany like music their chosen themes."

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

"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."

"Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked."

"All birth is unwilling."

"All scientific effort must now be concentrated in the area of defense (sic). We have learned our lesson. We, the most civilized of people, have been misled by our own sages through the last four thousand years. We are now over-civilized in a world of barbaric peoples. WE were taught centuries ago that war is not the pastime of a civilized people. We stopped the development of explosive weapons a thousand years ago, on the ground that it was inhuman and monstrous to kill innocent people. Let warriors fight with broadswords and kill each other, we said, but others who are innocent must not die by accident. Therefore, though we understood the principles of rocketry, we did not allow it to be used. Even gunpowder was used only in fireworks. We felt secure in our place under heaven, the centre of a protective ring of subject peoples, beyond whose borders we did not penetrate. Who could have imagined that those outer barbarians would themselves develop atomic bombs and rocket weapons and all manner of deadly chemicals?"

"All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so, as of now."

"An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls ? even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls ? without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell."

"And as for equality, are the fingers on one hand equal in length? Each has its place."

"And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted, and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked."

"And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land."

"Andre had been telling her an ancient legend of the fall of man into evil. It came about, he said, by the hand of a woman, Eve, who gave man forbidden fruit. And how was this woman to know that the fruit was forbidden? Madame Wu had inquired. An evil spirit, in the shape of a serpent, whispered it to her, Andre had said. Why to her instead of to the man? she had inquired. Because he knew that her mind and her heart were fixed not upon the man, but upon the pursuance of life, he had replied. The man's mind and heart were fixed upon himself. He was happy enough, dreaming that he possessed the woman and the garden. Why should he be tempted further? He had all. But the woman could always be tempted by the thought of a better garden, a larger space, more to possess, because she knew that out of her body would come many more beings, and for them she plotted and planned. The woman thought not of herself, but of the many whom she would create. For their sake she was tempted. For their sake she will always be tempted."

"As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world."

"At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them."

"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."

"Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us."

"Believing in gods always causes confusion."

"But we may say at least that for the interest of her chosen material, the sustained high level of her technical skill, and the frequent universality of her conceptions, Mrs. Buck is entitled to take rank as a considerable artist. To read her novels is to gain not merely knowledge of China but wisdom about life."

"But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?"

"Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?"

"Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne."

"Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivet‚, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy."

"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."

"Did one man write Shui Hu Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape, added to, rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a hand, in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They lived in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and heard, but of themselves they have told nothing."

"Do not test the measure of his love for you by the way he expresses his body's heat. He is not thinking of you at those times. He is thinking of himself."

"Drive out the tiger by the front gate and let in the wolf by the back gate."

"Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless."

"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. Fate, Mr. Kung taught me, is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance."

"Families are only a means of exploitation,' he declared. 'Parents treat children as capital assets and children wait for parents to die so that they will have an unearned income.' 'So children spy on fathers,' Mercy put in, 'and sons are sent far from their parents--' 'That the young may not inherit the prejudices of the old."

"Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance."

"Fate, Mr. Kung taught me, is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance."

"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."

"For the novelist believed that he should not be conscious of techniques. He should write as his material demanded."

"French is the most beautiful, he said, and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other."

"Fresh tadpoles coming out in the spring should be washed clean in cold well-water, and swallowed whole three or four days after menstruation. If a woman swallows fourteen live tadpoles on the first day and ten more on the following day, she will not conceive for five years. If contraception in still required after that, she can repeat the formula twice and be forever sterile... This formula is good in that it is effective, safe and not expensive. The defect is that it can be used only in the spring."