Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
Author
Essayist
Writer
Possible
Glance
Every
Glances
World
Opportunity
Joys
War
Quick
History
Universal
Savored
Shows
Ones
Incomprehensible
Anything
Joy
Beginnings
Back
Quite
Earliest
Even

More quotes by Barbara Holland

Image
Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.
Barbara Holland
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.
Barbara Holland
Image
No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
Barbara Holland
Image
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
Image
A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
Barbara Holland
Image
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
Image
The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
Barbara Holland
Image
By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.
Barbara Holland
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.
Barbara Holland
Image
New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.
Barbara Holland
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
Barbara Holland
Image
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