Quote

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

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
Bits
Writing
Selection
Difficulty
Choose
Creation
Novel
Leave

More quotes by 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
Sorrow and frustration have their power. The world is moved by people with great discontents. Happiness is a drug. It can make men blind and deaf and insensible to reality. There are times when only sorrow can give to sorrow.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
Image
the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!
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
Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
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 is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable its experiences have value because they have an end.
Winifred Holtby
Image
I find you in all small and lovely things in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter, in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in the summer garden.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Question everyone in authority, and see that you get sensible answers to your questions ... questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence. Vow as much love to your country as you like ... but, I implore you, do not forget to question.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Surely, if life is good, it is good throughout its substance we cannot separate men's activities from women's and say, these are worthy of praise and these unworthy.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.
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
It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
Winifred Holtby
Image
The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation it is understanding.
Winifred Holtby
Image
why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.
Winifred Holtby
Image
public work brings a vicarious but assured sense of immortality. We may be poor, weak, timid, in debt to our landlady, bullied by our nieces, stiff in the joints, shortsighted and distressed we shall perish, but the cause endures the cause is great.
Winifred Holtby
Image
I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.
Winifred Holtby
Image
I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.
Winifred Holtby