Winifred Holtby Quotations

The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.

The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.

What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.

God give me work, till my life shall end/And life, till my work is done.

Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?

Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.

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 ...

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.

Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.

the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.

Remorse ... is one of the many afflictions for which time finds a cure.

Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.

There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.

[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.

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.

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.

Those who prepare for war get it.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

I find you in all small and lovely things; in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter, in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in the summer garden.

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 ...

I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.

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.

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.

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.

it is better to take experience, to suffer, to love, and to remember than to walk unscathed between the fires. I've had most immunities myself - the result of an independent income combined with a personality completely devoid of sexual attractions - the two fires of poverty and passion have therefore never burned me, and I am a lesser person for my safety.

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 ...

The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.

Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!

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!

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.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.

It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.

why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.

Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.

But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence

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 ...

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?

Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy ...

Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.

I am much perturbed by this business of sickness. Our bodies seem so easily to leap into the saddle where our minds should be. People who are ill become changelings.

The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.

no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.

I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.

Question everyone in authority, and see that you get sensible answers to your questions ... questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence. Vow as much love to your country as you like ... but, I implore you, do not forget to question.

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.

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.

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.

it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.

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.

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.

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.

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.