Quote

Dogwoods are great optimists. Daffodils wait and see, crouching firmly underground just in case spring doesn't come this year, but dogwoods have faith.

Barbara Holland

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Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
Author
Essayist
Writer
Years
Spring
Daffodils
Cases
Daffodil
Waiting
Optimists
Year
Underground
Faith
Firmly
Doesn
Optimist
Come
Wait
Great
Case
Crouching

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If a quick glance back over world history shows us anything, it shows us that war was one of our most universal joys from our earliest beginnings, savored at every possible opportunity and even some quite incomprehensible ones.
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I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we've got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I'm not really in favor of health and fitness.
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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.
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War was ... the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citizenry by pointing out a national danger and declaring war on it.
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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.
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The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
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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.
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A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
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Sometimes, with luck, we find the kind of true friend, male or female, that appears only two or three times in a lucky lifetime, one that will winter us and summer us, grieve, rejoice, and travel with us.
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The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
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Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.
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Subtly, in the little ways, joy has been leaking out of our lives. The small pleasures of the ordinary day seem almost contemptible, and glance off us lightly...Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance. Bathrobes. Yawning and stretching. Real tomatoes.
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My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry it was their job.
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One's own flowers and some of one's own vegetables make acceptable, free, self-congratulatory gifts when visiting friends, though giving zucchini - or leaving it on the doorstep, ringing the bell, and running - is a social faux pas.
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The thousands of possible lives that used to spread out in front of me have snapped shut into one, and all I get is what I've got. It's time to pass on the possibilities, all those deliciously half-open doors, to my children, and drive them to the airports, and wish them bon voyage.
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No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
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Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.
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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.
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By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.
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Napping is too luxurious, too sybaritic, too unproductive, and it's free pleasures for which we don't pay make us anxious. Besides, it seems to be a natural inclination. ... Fighting off natural inclinations is a major Puritan virtue, and nothing that feels that good can be respectable.
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