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

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Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
Author
Essayist
Writer
Already
Visited
Joy
Visitors
Pleasure
Hospitality
Home
Visiting
Always
Rats
Like
Mixed
Sociability
Trapped
Visitor
Usually
Ambivalent

More quotes by Barbara Holland

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For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The touch of floor or carpet, grass or mud or asphalt, speaks to us loud and clear from the foot, that scorned and lowly organ as dear to us as our eyes and ears.
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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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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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
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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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Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.
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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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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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
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A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
Barbara Holland
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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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By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.
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?
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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The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
Barbara Holland
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Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.
Barbara Holland
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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.
Barbara Holland
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The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company.
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