Love & Passion Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Buck sneaks a small mercy into a culture that loves to audition mothers for sainthood. In one sentence, she normalizes the emotional whiplash of caregiving: tenderness and irritation aren’t opposites, they’re often the same impulse wearing different clothes. The line works because it refuses the sentimental trap of “good mother” versus “bad mother” and replaces it with a more honest physics of family life, where affection and authority constantly collide.

The intent is corrective. Buck isn’t excusing cruelty; she’s challenging the simplistic moral bookkeeping that treats scolding as a deficit of love rather than one of its messier expressions. “Kissing” reads as public, legible devotion; “scolding” is the private, socially suspect side of intimacy - the part that has to risk being disliked to do its job. By pairing them, she quietly argues that love is not always soft. It can be managerial, protective, even exasperated, because it’s attached to responsibility.

Context matters: Buck spent her life translating between worlds - American and Chinese, idealized family narratives and the actual labor of women’s lives. Her fiction is full of mothers whose virtue is not purity but endurance, whose emotions are complex because their circumstances are. In that light, the quote becomes less a bromide and more a cultural critique: we demand maternal warmth while denying mothers the full range of human reaction. Buck’s real provocation is that contradiction isn’t failure. It’s the lived texture of care.