Quote

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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Barbara Holland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 5
Died: 2010
Died: September 7
Author
Essayist
Writer
Feels
Feeling
Inadequate
Needs
Suffering
Modest
Less
Larger
Feelings
Ego
Around
Suffer
Self
Solitude
Need
Humble
Effacing
Feel
Company
Egos

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Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.
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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.
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Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.
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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.
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The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
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No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
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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.
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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.
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In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!
Barbara Holland