Winifred Holtby Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“it is better to take experience, to suffer, to love, and to remember than to walk unscathed between the fires. I've had most immunities myself - the result of an independent income combined with a personality completely devoid of sexual attractions - the two fires of poverty and passion have therefore never burned me, and I am a lesser person for my safety.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“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 -
“no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“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 -
“why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“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 -
“Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.”
-- Winifred Holtby -
“Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!”
-- Winifred Holtby
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