You are an artist,” she said. “But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.
Can one spit on a smiling face?” he inquired; or he said, “Vengeance cannot last a night’s sleep.
Old One,” the tenant said apologetically. “It is none of my business and I ought to die, but after all they are the children of your elder brother’s son who after all is the first in the next generation after you.
It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe.
But is strength comfort for a woman?
To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.
Ah well, Liang was her husband and she would never have another. Even had she been young and beautiful she would not have run from man to man as women did nowadays. But she was neither young nor beautiful and she was grateful for Liang. It was honorable to be his wife, and if he had a peevish temper at home, he might have been worse. He had never beaten her, and she had learned, after all these years, how to torture him.
For this Mary’s words were not surcharged with oversubtle meaning. No, she spoke them out swiftly and with sharp clearness and each word had its own weight and meaning and no more, good tools of her mind, but not messengers of vague suggestion.
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.
As life has proved, it is true that a woman’s body is more important than her mind. She alone can create new human creatures. Were it not for her, the race of man would cease to exist. Into her body, as into a chalice, Heaven has put this gift. Her body therefore is inexpressibly precious to man. He is not fulfilled if she does not create. His is the seed, but she alone can bring it to flower and fruit in another being like himself.
The gift he had been given was sometimes heavy to bear, the ability always to understand why the other person was as he was. Wounded, yes, but never angry, and there were times when he longed to feel fierce personal anger.
But the important lesson which he taught me was that if one would be happy he must not raise his head above his neighbor’s. “He who raises his head above the heads of others,” Mr. Kung said, “will sooner or later be decapitated.
Nations, like individuals, can only learn by their own individual experience.” Yul-chun.
Then the good land did again its healing work and the sun shone on him and healed him and the warm winds of summer wrapped him about with peace.
We are compelled to choose,” he sometimes complained, “between the savagery of Communism and the vulgarism of America.
The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.
The Empress Mother said with still more irritation, “I cannot understand why we must have a foreign religion here when we have three good religions of our own.
Attachment,” Buddha had said, “is the cause of grief.
Wang Lung, seeing them, was fit to burst with pride at this procession of his goodly sons, who were to continue after him the life of his body;.
But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women.