Top 40 Winifred Holtby Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Winifred Holtby

2. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

5. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

6. “I was born to be a spinster, and, by God, I’m going to spin.”

— Winifred Holtby

7. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

8. “It’s the things you don’t do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.”

— Winifred Holtby

9. “Go therefore, and do that which is within you to do. Take no heed of gestures that beckon you aside. Ask of no man permission to perform.”

— Winifred Holtby

10. “I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.”

— Winifred Holtby

11. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

12. “Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy...”

— Winifred Holtby

13. “The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.”

— Winifred Holtby

14. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

15. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

16. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

17. “To choose, to take, with clear judgement and open eyes; to count the cost and pay it; to regret nothing; to go forward, cutting losses, refusing to complain, accepting complete responsibility for their own decisions – this was the code which she attempted to impress upon the children who came under her influence – the code on which she set herself to act.”

— Winifred Holtby

18. “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...”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

20. “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...”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

22. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

23. “But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence.”

— Winifred Holtby

24. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

26. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

27. “Look here,′ she began, ’you can’t go on like that, you know. If you are really keen on a thing, and it’s a good thing, you ought to go and do it. It is no use waiting till people tell you that you may go. Asking permission is a coward’s way of shifting responsibility on to some one else.”

— Winifred Holtby

28. “Those who prepare for war get it.”

— Winifred Holtby

29. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

30. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

31. “Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.”

— Winifred Holtby

32. “Thus they had harvested at Anderby since those far off years when the Danes broke in across the headland and dyed with blood the trampled barley. Thus and thus had the workers passed, and the children waved their garlands following the last load home. Thus had Mary and other Mary Robsons before her welcomed the master of the harvest.”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

34. “Everybody’s tragedy is somebody’s nuisance.”

— Winifred Holtby

35. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

36. “Oh, lovely world,′ thought Sarah, in love with life and all its varied richness.”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

38. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

39. “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...”

— Winifred Holtby

40. “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.”

— Winifred Holtby

41. “Clever? who said that we all had to be clever? But we have to have courage. The whole position of women is what it is to-day, because so many of us have followed the line of least resistance, and have sat down placidly in a little provincial town, waiting to get married. No wonder that the men have thought that this is all that we are good for.”

— Winifred Holtby

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

— Winifred Holtby

43. “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...”

— Winifred Holtby

44. “If we haven’t a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.”

— Winifred Holtby

45. “I believe that service lies in this – that each of us should use in the highest way, to the very widest possible extent, the abilities and powers they have been given. I believe that to be content with humbler service, when one is able to stand greater responsibility, is only cowardice.”

— Winifred Holtby

46. “HIs slower mind could not keep pace with her swift reactions; his emotions, not easily aroused, were still less easily subdued. Always he felt himself left far behind her, dull, clumsy, insensitive, too fond, too gross, too awkward.”

— Winifred Holtby