10 quotes
Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.
My Several Worlds (1954)
There is something to be said for losing one’s possessions, after nothing can be done about it.
My Several Worlds (1954)
Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.
My Several Worlds (1954)
Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.
My Several Worlds (1954)
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 to ignorance.
My Several Worlds (1954)
Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.
My Several Worlds (1954)
But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.
My Several Worlds (1954)
I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety.
My Several Worlds (1954)
The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do.
My Several Worlds (1954)
I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.
My Several Worlds (1954)