Winifred Holtby Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

Winifred Holtby
The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.

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
But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence

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
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
Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?

Winifred Holtby
When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.

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
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
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
What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book...

Winifred Holtby
I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.

Winifred Holtby
I find you in all small and lovely things; in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter, in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in the summer garden.

Winifred Holtby
The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end.

Winifred Holtby
Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.

Winifred Holtby
No truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.

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 advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.

Winifred Holtby
Teachers have power. We may cripple them by petty economics; by Government regulations, by the foolish criticism of an uninformed press; but their power exists for good or evil...

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
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 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
All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation — Good Lord deliver us!

Winifred Holtby
Sixty if she's a day. Calls herself forty-seven, of course. They're all forty-seven when they get past fifty.

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
The ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.

Winifred Holtby
Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.

Winifred Holtby
The damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.

Winifred Holtby
The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.

Winifred Holtby