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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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Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
Author
Essayist
Writer
York
Sophistication
Nobody
Attitudes
Talent
Requirements
Attitude
Talents
Prayer
Minimum
Called
Elsewhere
Achieved
Yorkers
Variety
Requirement

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
Barbara Holland
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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.
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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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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A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
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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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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By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.
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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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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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