Quote

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.

Barbara Holland

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Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
Author
Essayist
Writer
Make
Flower
Visiting
Though
Gardening
Friends
Bells
Congratulatory
Free
Vegetables
Zucchini
Social
Acceptable
Faux
Running
Gifts
Ringing
Self
Flowers
Doorstep
Giving
Leaving
Bell

More quotes by Barbara Holland

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There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!
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In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.
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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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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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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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The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
Barbara Holland
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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?
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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.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.
Barbara Holland
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New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.
Barbara Holland
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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
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In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red Sox.
Barbara Holland