Barbara Holland Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition claims that a moderate beer drinker — whatever that means — swallows 11 percent of his dietary protein needs, 12 percent of the carbohydrates, 9 percent of essential phosphorus, 7 percent of his riboflavin, and 5 percent of niacin. Should he go on to immoderate beer drinking, he becomes a walking vitamin pill.

Barbara Holland
Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy.... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

Barbara Holland
Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painful, humorless, and boring.

Barbara Holland
We're a shifty, sliding population.... What we refer to as 'home' may be a place we haven't seen in years; a place where there's no one left who knows our name.

Barbara Holland
By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.

Barbara Holland
I have ferreted out the alarm clock, plugged it in, and set it, musing on the word 'alarm' and why the world must be wakened daily to cries of panic and danger.

Barbara Holland
Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer.

Barbara Holland
Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a friend might find his castle burnt down or a wayfarer find bandits on his trail.

Barbara Holland
In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.

Barbara Holland
One's own flowers and some of one's own vegetables make acceptable, free, self-congratulatory gifts when visiting friends, though giving zucchini — or leaving it on the doorstep, ringing the bell, and running — is a social faux pas.

Barbara Holland
She's a cat with a strong sense of order and the rightness of things, and would have made an excellent secretary.

Barbara Holland
In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land.

Barbara Holland
Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resist?

Barbara Holland
The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

Barbara Holland
Last summer, a man in one of the villages up the road sold the house in which he'd been born and lived for eighty-one years, and bought and moved into the house next door. A friend of mine asked him why. The fellow said, poker-faced, 'I reckon it's just the gypsy in me.'

Barbara Holland
The nostalgic notion of the family orchards is lovely—all that wholesome fruit for our forebears to sit on the back steps biting into—but basically we were growing it to drink.

Barbara Holland
It's curious that throughout our history together, with no apparent effort, people have been able to think of the cat simultaneously as the guardian spirit of the hearth and home, and as the emblem of freedom, independence, and rootlessness.

Barbara Holland
Dogwoods are great optimists. Daffodils wait and see, crouching firmly underground just in case spring doesn't come this year, but dogwoods have faith.

Barbara Holland
Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.

Barbara Holland
Parties happened more easily and more often in the olden days; a piano and three or more people constituted a party.

Barbara Holland
A woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Barbara Holland
New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.

Barbara Holland
Maybe tips act as a magnet for all our insecurities. Maybe they're the final exam on our ability to survive on our own; will we leave too much out of nervous apology for our lives, or not enough, out of sheer incompetence?

Barbara Holland
The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company.

Barbara Holland
However long you have a cat and however plainly he lays his life open before you, there is always something hidden, some name he goes by in a place you never heard of.

Barbara Holland
Success in war was the only success that counted; failure was a disgrace to be wiped out only by starting another war and winning it.

Barbara Holland
Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people's poems is pointless since those aren't our own inmost feelings.

Barbara Holland
Winston Churchill] poured the gin into a pitcher and then nodded ritually at the bottle of vermouth across the room.

Barbara Holland
Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

Barbara Holland
War was... the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citizenry by pointing out a national danger and declaring war on it.

Barbara Holland