Winifred Holtby
The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.Collection: Happiness
The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.
These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
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.Collection: Hands
Question everyone in authority, and see that you get sensible answers to your questions ... questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence. Vow as much love to your country as you like ... but, I implore you, do not forget to question.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Sleep
Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.Collection: Giving
It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.Collection: Sorry
There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.Collection: Peace
A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.Collection: Humor
Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.Collection: Men
Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: People
no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.Collection: Strong
Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.Collection: Time
Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool. ... Fate is certain; death is certain; but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.Collection: Fate
Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.Collection: Tragedy
But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligenceCollection: Mean
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.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: Happiness
You are quite, quite wrong if you think that ... I find your happiness painful. What matters is that happiness - the golden day - should exist in the world, not much to whom it comes. For all of us it is so transitory a thing, how could one not draw joy from its arrival?Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Congratulations
it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.Collection: Ends
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Travel
The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Change
I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.Collection: Chocolate
Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.Collection: Progress
Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?Collection: Time
I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.Collection: Hard Work
the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.Collection: Voice
Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Strong
Those who prepare for war get it.Collection: War
Remorse ... is one of the many afflictions for which time finds a cure.Collection: Regret
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!Collection: Innovation
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.Collection: Book
[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.Collection: Golf
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.Collection: Niece
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.Collection: Writing
The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.Collection: Dog
If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.Collection: Fortune
Surely, if life is good, it is good throughout its substance; we cannot separate men's activities from women's and say, these are worthy of praise and these unworthy.Collection: Life Is Good