Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country. - Samuel Butler

a good deal of unkindness and selfishness on the part of parents towards children is not generally followed by ill consequences to the parents themselves. They may cast a gloom over their children’s lives for many years without having to suffer anything that will hurt them. I should say, then, that it shows no great moral obliquity on the part of parents if within certain limits they make their children’s lives a burden to them.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition.