Quote

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

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
Become
Conscious
Deadening
Doe
Perhaps
Shackles
Take
Imagination
Bind
Writing
Sort
Cowardice
Long
Break
Writes
Free
Mediocrity
Doesn
Mental
Form
Wings
Shackle

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

Image
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
Image
Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.
Winifred Holtby
Image
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
Image
If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.
Winifred Holtby
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
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
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
Image
Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?
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
the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.
Winifred Holtby
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence
Winifred Holtby