Top 58 Holtby Quotes
#1. To her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice ... Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
#3. I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.
Winifred Holtby
#4. I find you in all small and lovely things; in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter, in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in the summer garden.
Winifred Holtby
#6. HIs slower mind could not keep pace with her swift reactions; his emotions, not easily aroused, were still less easily subdued. Always he felt himself left far behind her, dull, clumsy, insensitive, too fond, too gross, too awkward.
Winifred Holtby
#7. The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
Winifred Holtby
#8. Sorrow and frustration have their power. The world is moved by people with great discontents. Happiness is a drug. It can make men blind and deaf and insensible to reality. There are times when only sorrow can give to sorrow.
Winifred Holtby
#9. It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
Winifred Holtby
#10. Lydia delighted her. The girl's roughness, her ability, her exuberance, were qualities desired by Sarah for her children. You could make something out of a girl like that. She had power.
Winifred Holtby
#11. Oh, lovely world,' thought Sarah, in love with life and all its varied richness.
Winifred Holtby
#12. The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end.
Winifred Holtby
#13. But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.
Winifred Holtby
#15. Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet ...
Winifred Holtby
#16. Teachers have power. We may cripple them by petty economics; by Government regulations, by the foolish criticism of an uninformed press; but their power exists for good or evil ...
Winifred Holtby
#17. But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence
Winifred Holtby
#18. Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Winifred Holtby
#19. This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.
Winifred Holtby
#20. Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
#21. It is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.
Winifred Holtby
#22. If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.
Winifred Holtby
#23. The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.
Winifred Holtby
#25. Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.
Winifred Holtby
#26. If you are rich, you have lovely cars, and jars full of flowers, and books in rows, and a wireless, and the best sort of gramophone and meringues for supper.
Winifred Holtby
#27. I am much perturbed by this business of sickness. Our bodies seem so easily to leap into the saddle where our minds should be. People who are ill become changelings.
Winifred Holtby
#28. Their language was an old wild language. They had known incredible loves and dark adventures and the twisted streets of alien cities. They had known the green breaking waves of the sea, and the green aisles of the silent forests. They had known war and death and fierce, cruel elation.
Winifred Holtby
#29. And not there, not there, not there,
Your laughing face and your wind-blown hair
Leave not even a ghost in the garden.
Winifred Holtby
#30. I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action ...
Winifred Holtby
#31. Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!
Winifred Holtby
#32. Go therefore, and do that which is within you to do. Take no heed of gestures that beckon you aside. Ask of no man permission to perform.
Winifred Holtby
#33. These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
Winifred Holtby
#34. The damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.
Winifred Holtby
#36. Public work brings a vicarious but assured sense of immortality. We may be poor, weak, timid, in debt to our landlady, bullied by our nieces, stiff in the joints, shortsighted and distressed; we shall perish, but the cause endures; the cause is great.
Winifred Holtby
#37. Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.
Winifred Holtby
#38. I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.
Winifred Holtby
#39. The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing
Winifred Holtby
#40. Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?
Winifred Holtby
#41. Look here,' she began, 'you can't go on like that, you know. If you are really keen on a thing, and it's a good thing, you ought to go and do it. It is no use waiting till people tell you that you may go. Asking permission is a coward's way of shifting responsibility on to some one else.
Winifred Holtby
#42. We are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.
Winifred Holtby
#43. I was born to be a spinster, and, by God, I'm going to spin.
Winifred Holtby
#44. What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book ...
Winifred Holtby
#45. No truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.
Winifred Holtby
#46. [On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.
Winifred Holtby
#47. We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.
Winifred Holtby
#48. A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.
Winifred Holtby
#49. Do. Do? Oh, you never do anything except the things I tell you. You're always wringing your hands and looking sorry, but I always have to think of the things to do .
Winifred Holtby
#51. The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.
Winifred Holtby
#52. It's much easier to feel (and be) safer in a tiny house. After a very short time, you will know every little nook and cranny in your house. In a large house, there are more places for someone to break into, more places for someone to hide, and more places that you have to be wary of danger.
Michael Holtby
#53. You are quite, quite wrong if you think that ... I find your happiness painful. What matters is that happiness - the golden day - should exist in the world, not much to whom it comes. For all of us it is so transitory a thing, how could one not draw joy from its arrival?
Winifred Holtby
#54. Surely, if life is good, it is good throughout its substance; we cannot separate men's activities from women's and say, these are worthy of praise and these unworthy ...
Winifred Holtby
#55. Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool ... Fate is certain; death is certain; but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.
Winifred Holtby
#56. I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.
Winifred Holtby
#57. What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.
Winifred Holtby
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