Winifred Holtby Quotes
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Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.
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Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.
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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.
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Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?
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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.
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I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.
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It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
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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.
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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.
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Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.
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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.
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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.
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There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.
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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!
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It is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.
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Remorse ... is one of the many afflictions for which time finds a cure.
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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.
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Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.
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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.
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the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.
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I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.
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Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
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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.
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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.