“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 ...”

“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...”

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

“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 ...”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”