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.

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.