Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

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.

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.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.