Barbara Holland Quotes

Very few people have no opinions about cats.

Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a friend might find his castle burnt down or a wayfarer find bandits on his trail.

Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

If a quick glance back over world history shows us anything, it shows us that war was one of our most universal joys from our earliest beginnings, savored at every possible opportunity and even some quite incomprehensible ones.

Our Revolution was born and raised in taverns.

War was … the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citizenry by pointing out a national danger and declaring war on it.

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.

Anyone who has raised more than one child knows full well that kids turn out the way they turn out – astonishingly, for the most part, and usually quite unlike their siblings, even their twins, raised under the same flawed rooftree. Little we have done or said, or left undone and unsaid, seems to have made much mark. It’s hubris to suppose ourselves so influential; a casual remark on the playground is as likely to change their lives as any dedicated campaign of ours. They come with much of their own software already in place, waiting, and none of the keys we press will override it.

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

Recreational talking is, along with private singing, one of our saddest recent losses. Like singing, talking has become a job for trained professionals, who are paid considerable sums of money to do it on television and radio while we sit silently listening or, if we’re truly lonely and determined, call the station and sit holding the phone waiting for a chance to contribute our two cents’ worth.

By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.

New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.