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.”(America’s Medieval Women, Harper’s Magazine, August 1938)

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.

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

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

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

Je suis comme un pont fragile, reliant à travers l’infini le passé et le présent. Je serre la main maternelle. Je ne peux pas la laisser échapper, car sans moi ma mère serait seule.

Now, five years is nothing in a man’s life except when he is very young and very old…- Wang Lung

Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself

Out of the woman’s great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the...

He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he...

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...

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored — it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects...

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...

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?

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

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...

However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness.

On croirait qu’il y a en elle deux personnes : l’une silencieuse, lointaine, même un peu taciturne, l’autre très gaie, mais d’une gaieté trop forcée pour être de la vraie joie.

Mais elle est ainsi, vivant en elle-même, voyant de la beauté où d’autres n’en trouvent point.

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.

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.

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

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...

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.

If you start to revise before you’ve reached the end, you’re likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

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...