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Barbara Holland Quotes - Page 3

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a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Barbara Holland
Mother, Husband, Father
Barbara Holland (1996). “One's Company: Reflections on Living Alone”

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

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

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

I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we've got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I'm not really in favor of health and fitness.

Barbara Holland
Tired, Sick, Water
"She'll Drink to That" by Peter Carlson, www.washingtonpost.com. May 29, 2007.

Very few people have no opinions about cats.

Barbara Holland
Cat, People, Opinion
Barbara Holland (1994). “Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives”, Ivy Books

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

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

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

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

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

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