Quote

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

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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
World
Missing
Troubled
Alive
Flavor
Pain
Pleased
Experience
Salt
Persons
Beloved
Person
Unhappy
Maimed
Wells
Miss
Sharpness
Well
Loves
Misses

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.
Winifred Holtby
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Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.
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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The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
Winifred Holtby
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Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool. ... Fate is certain death is certain but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation it is understanding.
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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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
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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 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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Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.
Winifred Holtby
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What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.
Winifred Holtby