Quote #78

How does a woman of this magnitude and range slip away from our national consciousness? She has not exactly disappeared. Rather, as one reader of an earlier draft of this book shrewdly put it, she has been 'hidden in plain sight,' obscured beneath a caricature that belies her complexity and her achievement. ... In the years after World War II, Buck's literary reputation shrunk to the vanishing point. She stood on the wrong side of virtually every line drawn by those who constructed the lists of required reading in the 1950s and 1960s.

More from Pearl Buck

  1. Buck's efforts on behalf of equality included tireless support for women's rights. She promoted modern birth control and called her friend …
  2. She was a spokesman on all sorts of issues: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the adoptability of disadvantaged children, the futu…
  3. You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come into contact with a new idea.
  4. The most influential Westerner to write about China since thirteenth-century Marco Polo.
  5. A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent, without giv…
  6. We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next.
  7. Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.
  8. When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

All Pearl Buck quotes