But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.