Winifred Holtby Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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
Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't — yet...

Winifred Holtby
The conductor obeyed all too literally the proverbial mandate. His right hand rarely knew what his left hand did...

Winifred Holtby
She was suffering acutely, for it was her instinct to give people what they wanted, and there was nothing that she could do for Evelyn.

Winifred Holtby
I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.

Winifred Holtby
Contrary to popular superstition, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is impotence; it is fear; it is cruelty; it is all the things that make for unhappiness.

Winifred Holtby
We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.

Winifred Holtby
If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.

Winifred Holtby