We cannot alter other people, or their lives, or their destinies, by offering them sweets to take away the bitter taste, any more than they can alter us.

For she could not really know how profound had become my mistrust of a world in which wars could still come into evil flower, and in which individuals could play with and brutally alter the myriad personal fates of whole nations of men and women.

I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.

All children think unkindly of their parents at some time or another