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
Sea
Weak
Kneed
Tears
Calf
Start
Calves
Strong
Sufficiently
Book
Damned
Writing
Tear
Like
Minded

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

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All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!
Winifred Holtby
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Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
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Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Winifred Holtby
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Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?
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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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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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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But to write - that is grief and labor and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.
Winifred Holtby
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why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.
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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The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
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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Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.
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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I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.
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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I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.
Winifred Holtby
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Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.
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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What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.
Winifred Holtby