Quotes from Barbara Holland

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

True ownership of anything requires time.

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

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.

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.

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

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

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.

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.