Top 40 Barbara Holland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “True ownership of anything requires time...”

— Barbara Holland

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

— Barbara Holland

3. “Dogwoods are great optimists. Daffodils wait and see, crouching firmly underground just in case spring doesn’t come this year, but dogwoods have faith.”

— Barbara Holland

4. “Our Revolution was born and raised in taverns.”

— Barbara Holland

5. “Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.”

— Barbara Holland

6. “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

7. “Sometimes, with luck, we find the kind of true friend, male or female, that appears only two or three times in a lucky lifetime, one that will winter us and summer us, grieve, rejoice, and travel with us.”

— Barbara Holland

8. “The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company.”

— Barbara Holland

9. “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

10. “Cats vary so widely that all data is meaningless and the professional classifiers gnash their teeth trying to come up with even a single fact common to all.”

— Barbara Holland

11. “No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.”

— Barbara Holland

12. “Perhaps it’s a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.”

— Barbara Holland

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

— Barbara Holland

14. “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

15. “It’s curious that throughout our history together, with no apparent effort, people have been able to think of the cat simultaneously as the guardian spirit of the hearth and home, and as the emblem of freedom, independence, and rootlessness.”

— Barbara Holland

16. “The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.”

— Barbara Holland

17. “Success in war was the only success that counted; failure was a disgrace to be wiped out only by starting another war and winning it.”

— Barbara Holland

18. “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.”

— Barbara Holland

19. “The thousands of possible lives that used to spread out in front of me have snapped shut into one, and all I get is what I’ve got. It’s time to pass on the possibilities, all those deliciously half-open doors, to my children, and drive them to the airports, and wish them bon voyage.”

— Barbara Holland

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

— Barbara Holland

21. “There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!”

— Barbara Holland

22. “A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.”

— Barbara Holland

23. “Smiting enemies has always been so admired that, unlike medicine or archaeology, it entitled its successful practitioners to become kings, emperors, and presidents...”

— Barbara Holland

24. “In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.”

— Barbara Holland

25. “Life, after we’d had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.”

— Barbara Holland

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

— Barbara Holland

27. “To extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.”

— Barbara Holland

28. “Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painfu, humorless, and boring.”

— Barbara Holland

29. “One’s own flowers and some of one’s own vegetables make acceptable, free, self-congratulatory gifts when visiting friends, though giving zucchini – or leaving it on the doorstep, ringing the bell, and running – is a social faux pas.”

— Barbara Holland

30. “The trouble with American History is that you don’t remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.”

— Barbara Holland

31. “However long you have a cat and however plainly he lays his life open before you, there is always something hidden, some name he goes by in a place you never heard of.”

— Barbara Holland

32. “Very few people have no opinions about cats.”

— Barbara Holland

33. “Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer.”

— Barbara Holland

34. “In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red Sox.”

— Barbara Holland

35. “A catless writer is almost inconceivable.”

— Barbara Holland

36. “The United States government, in figuring our gross national product, defines ‘durable goods’ as anything that will last three years.”

— Barbara Holland

37. “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...”

— Barbara Holland

38. “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

39. “My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job.”

— Barbara Holland

40. “The nostalgic notion of the family orchards is lovely – all that wholesome fruit for our forebears to sit on the back steps biting into – but basically we were growing it to drink.”

— Barbara Holland