41 Quotes by Barbara Holland

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...

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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