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
Self
Solitude
Need
Humble
Effacing
Company
Egos
Feel
Feeling
Inadequate
Feels
Suffering
Modest
Needs
Less
Larger
Feelings
Ego
Around
Suffer

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Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.
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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?
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By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.
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Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.
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The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
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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.
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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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No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.
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A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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