Quote

You are quite, quite wrong if you think that ... I find your happiness painful. What matters is that happiness - the golden day - should exist in the world, not much to whom it comes. For all of us it is so transitory a thing, how could one not draw joy from its arrival?

Winifred Holtby

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Winifred Holtby
Age: 37 †
Born: 1898
Born: June 23
Died: 1935
Died: September 29
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Suffragette
Writer
Rudston
East Riding of Yorkshire
Matter
Matters
Thing
Exist
Arrival
Much
Joy
Arrivals
Think
Quite
Transitory
Thinking
Wrong
Draw
World
Happiness
Golden
Comes
Painful
Find
Draws

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

Image
why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.
Winifred Holtby
Image
I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Those who prepare for war get it.
Winifred Holtby
Image
the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.
Winifred Holtby
Image
We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.
Winifred Holtby
Image
This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.
Winifred Holtby
Image
[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool. ... Fate is certain death is certain but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.
Winifred Holtby
Image
The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.
Winifred Holtby
Image
we are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.
Winifred Holtby
Image
It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
Winifred Holtby
Image
no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.
Winifred Holtby
Image
The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.
Winifred Holtby
Image
There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.
Winifred Holtby
Image
I am much perturbed by this business of sickness. Our bodies seem so easily to leap into the saddle where our minds should be. People who are ill become changelings.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Winifred Holtby
Image
What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.
Winifred Holtby