Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

They... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this - animated, but collateral.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.