Barbara Holland Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Barbara Holland
A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; finer souls draw ethical and spiritual nutrients from the sight.

Barbara Holland
There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

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
Smiting enemies has always been so admired that, unlike medicine or archaeology, it entitled its successful practitioners to become kings, emperors, and presidents.

Barbara Holland
Nobody complains about hospital food anymore; perhaps hospitals no longer need to serve food, since all the patients are sent home before dinnertime. Consumer advocates urge us to get tough with our provide organizations, demand our rights, and stomp out in a snit to try elsewhere, but this is a lot to ask when we're wobbly and feverish, or perhaps unconscious.

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

Barbara Holland
Moral indignation is a pleasure, often the only pleasure, in many lives. It's also one of the few pleasures people feel obliged to force on other people.

Barbara Holland
A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

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

Barbara Holland
For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The touch of floor or carpet, grass or mud or asphalt, speaks to us loud and clear from the foot, that scorned and lowly organ as dear to us as our eyes and ears.

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
Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For one thing sports, unlike life, are played according to rules. Indeed, the rules are the sport: life may behave bizarrely and still be life, but if the runner circles the bases clockwise it's no longer baseball.

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
We don't get enough pampering. If we were once the only child of an adoring mother, we developed a taste for it; if not, we developed a thirst for it.

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
The new little black cat never opens her mouth to say anything, but speaks in her throat, to herself, trotting up and down stairs and in and out of closets chirping and murmuring and exclaiming in a kind of watered-silk pattern of sound that can make the possessor of mere English feel as mute and flightless as a turnip.

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
In the suburbs, everywhere you go you're trespassing, but a city is public property; if you're there, it's yours, and we set our feet down on our city as firmly as kings.

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

Barbara Holland
Parents needn't bother driving small children around to see the purple mountains' majesties; the children will go right on duking it out in the back seat and whining for food as if you were showing them Cincinnati. No one under twenty really wants to look at scenery.

Barbara Holland
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
Sometimes, with luck, we find the kind of true friend, male or female, that appears only two or three times in a lucky lifetime, one that will winter us and summer us, grieve, rejoice, and travel with us.

Barbara Holland
Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.

Barbara Holland