mother-time

Updated: May 5, 2025

He could not be all to the cause he honored that other men were men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes because his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time. He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored.

William Dean Howells - Emile Zola