When I got to 40 or so… I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some...

Of course when a religious faith has been shaken to its foundation, it is natural to suppose that morals must have been simultaneously affected.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other...

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the...

As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of man’s life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it.

There was very little suicide among the men of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying...

To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river, – the River of Heaven, – the Silver Stream.