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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

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Winifred Holtby
Age: 37 †
Born: 1898
Born: June 23
Died: 1935
Died: September 29
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Suffragette
Writer
Rudston
East Riding of Yorkshire
Choose
Creation
Novel
Leave
Bits
Writing
Selection
Difficulty

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

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Teachers have power. We may cripple them by petty economics by Government regulations, by the foolish criticism of an uninformed press but their power exists for good or evil.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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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
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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
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Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.
Winifred Holtby
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But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence
Winifred Holtby
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[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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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
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Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.
Winifred Holtby
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Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Winifred Holtby
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The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation it is understanding.
Winifred Holtby
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no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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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
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When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.
Winifred Holtby