Barbara Holland Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

Cats vary so widely that all data is meaningless and the professional classifiers gnash their teeth trying to come up with even a single fact common to all.

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
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
No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.

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
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
Everything from a train window has the feverish reality we yearn for when we travel.

Barbara Holland
I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we've got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I'm not really in favor of health and fitness.

Barbara Holland
Napping is too luxurious, too sybaritic, too unproductive, and it's free; pleasures for which we don't pay make us anxious. Besides, it seems to be a natural inclination.... Fighting off natural inclinations is a major Puritan virtue, and nothing that feels that good can be respectable.

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
The United States government, in figuring our gross national product, defines 'durable goods' as anything that will last three years.

Barbara Holland
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
The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.

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
For decades, you couldn't hold up your head without one. 'My analyst says...,' you offered airily, and strangers knew you immediately for a person of education and discernment.

Barbara Holland
If a quick glance back over world history shows us anything, it shows us that war was one of our most universal joys from our earliest beginnings, savored at every possible opportunity and even some quite incomprehensible ones.

Barbara Holland
'Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It meant, 'One can plainly see you are sensitive, intense, and interesting, and therefore neurotic.' Only the dullest of clods trudged around without a neurosis.

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
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
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
In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red Sox.

Barbara Holland
A cardinal in a slant of winter sunlight goes straight to the bloodstream like brandy, and the heart leaps up like a startled stag.

Barbara Holland
In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

Barbara Holland
To extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.

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

Barbara Holland