Barbara Holland Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We'd expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons.

  Barbara Holland

  Spring, Real, Winter

  4 Copy quote

• We're a shifty, sliding population. ... What we refer to as 'home' may be a place we haven't seen in years; a place where there's no one left who knows our name.

  Barbara Holland

  Home, Years, Names

  4 Copy quote

• We don't get enough pampering. If we were once the only child of an adoring mother, we developed a taste for it; if not, we developed a thirst for it.

  Barbara Holland

  Mother, Children, Pampering

  15 Copy quote

• Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resist?

  Barbara Holland

  Dog, Thinking, Sun

  4 Copy quote

• In America, snobs who wouldn't be seen dead with a lottery ticket play the stock market. We like to gamble. Winning, we have closed our eyes, leapt across the yawning abyss, and landed knee-deep in daisies. Even losing has a certain gloomy glamour: the gods of chance are worthy opponents; we have engaged them in hand-to-hand combat and though we lost, at least we shrank not from the contest.

  Barbara Holland

  Eye, Winning, Yawning

  8 Copy quote

• A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; finer souls draw ethical and spiritual nutrients from the sight.

  Barbara Holland

  Spiritual, Eye, Sight

  7 Copy quote

• Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

  Barbara Holland

  Home, Joy, Rats

  6 Copy quote

• There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

  Barbara Holland

  Communication, Needs, Language

  Barbara Holland (2010). “Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives”, p.25, Harper Collins

  7 Copy quote

• Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

  Barbara Holland

  Shoes, Roots, Good Times

  4 Copy quote

• For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats.

  Barbara Holland

  Art, Confused, Years

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people's poems is pointless since those aren't our own inmost feelings.

  Barbara Holland

  Art, Reading, Writing

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

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