Barbara Holland Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• In America, snobs who wouldn't be seen dead with a lottery ticket play the stock market. We like to gamble. Winning, we have closed our eyes, leapt across the yawning abyss, and landed knee-deep in daisies. Even losing has a certain gloomy glamour: the gods of chance are worthy opponents; we have engaged them in hand-to-hand combat and though we lost, at least we shrank not from the contest.

  Barbara Holland

  Eye, Winning, Yawning

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  New York, Prayer, Attitude

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a friend might find his castle burnt down or a wayfarer find bandits on his trail.

  Barbara Holland

  Doors, Safety, Important

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Reading, Writing

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dog, Thinking, Sun

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sports, Baseball, Games

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Husband, Father

  Barbara Holland (1996). “One's Company: Reflections on Living Alone”

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Home, Joy, Rats

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Children, Pampering

  15 Copy quote

• Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We'd expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons.

  Barbara Holland

  Spring, Real, Winter

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Spiritual, Eye, Sight

  7 Copy quote

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