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I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.

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
Writing
Present
Pedestrians
Going
High
Affords
Think
Desire
Cursed
Thinking
Means
Expressing
Write
Prose
Give
Weren
Giving
Gods
Inordinate
Mean
Talent
Pedestrian

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

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I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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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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It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
Winifred Holtby
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If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.
Winifred Holtby
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Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!
Winifred Holtby
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A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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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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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
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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
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Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Winifred Holtby
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The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end.
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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If you are rich, you have lovely cars, and jars full of flowers, and books in rows, and a wireless, and the best sort of gramophone and meringues for supper.
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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Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
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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
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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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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