"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."

"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday."

"It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation as coloured Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens."

"Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do."

"Wandering is never waste, dear boy, ' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation."

"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 thatwithout 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."

"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds."

"Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes."

"I am comforted by life's stability by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge."

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

"To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death."

"Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought."

"A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love."

"Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it."

"We must have hope or starve to death."

"Love dies only when growth stops."

"The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it generation after generation."

"If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all."

"Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself."

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

"Hunger makes a thief of any man."

"Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness."

"One faces the future with one's past."

"Order is the shape upon which beauty depends."

"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."

"Growth itself contains the germ of happiness."

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

"The narrator refers to a character as 'an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them."

"In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write."

"Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels."

"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."

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

"And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was."

"Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.She knew she was immortal."

"The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration."

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

"Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame."

"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members."

"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."