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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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Citizenry
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War
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Prehistory
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Discontented
More quotes by Barbara Holland
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
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
Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
Barbara Holland
In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.
Barbara Holland
No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
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
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
Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.
Barbara Holland
New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.
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
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
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