Quote

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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Winifred Holtby
Age: 37 †
Born: 1898
Born: June 23
Died: 1935
Died: September 29
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Suffragette
Writer
Rudston
East Riding of Yorkshire
Tears
Calf
Start
Calves
Strong
Sufficiently
Book
Damned
Writing
Tear
Like
Minded
Sea
Weak
Kneed

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

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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.
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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.
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Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.
Winifred Holtby
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Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.
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Those who prepare for war get it.
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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it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable its experiences have value because they have an end.
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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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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Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
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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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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the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.
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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But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence
Winifred Holtby
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why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.
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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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
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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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The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.
Winifred Holtby