Barbara Holland - People Quotes

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

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

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

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