“To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)”

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang Lung”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“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 was dead, since hi...”

“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 other, ans she let ...”

“Jesus-shaped spirituality hears Jesus say "believe and repent," but the call that resonates most closely in the heart of a disciple is "follow me." The command to follow requires that we take a dai...”

“The engine that drives all your activities is hope. What you hope in shapes you.”

“I assumed my first undivided responsibility.”

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now....”

“Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you've seen this entertainment through and through you have seen yo...”

“We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some...”

“Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been holding on to more dearly than Him.”

“The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.”

“... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and dis...”