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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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Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
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Writer
Politician
Citizenry
Danger
Declaring
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Unified
Maybe
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Morning
Patriotism
War
Chief
Many
Chiefs
Prehistory
National
Discontented
More quotes by Barbara Holland
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
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
No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
Barbara Holland
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.
Barbara Holland
By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.
Barbara Holland
In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.
Barbara Holland
The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
Barbara Holland
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
Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.
Barbara Holland
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
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
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
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.
Barbara Holland
