Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Imagination
Bind
Take
Sort
Cowardice
Writing
Break
Writes
Long
Free
Mediocrity
Doesn
Mental
Form
Wings
Shackle
Conscious
Deadening
Become
Perhaps
Shackles
Doe
More quotes by Winifred Holtby
If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.
Winifred Holtby
Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?
Winifred Holtby
Those who prepare for war get it.
Winifred Holtby
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
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
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
Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
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
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
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
why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.
Winifred Holtby
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
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
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
I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.
Winifred Holtby
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
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
What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.
Winifred Holtby
[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.
Winifred Holtby
The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
Winifred Holtby