Barbara Pym Quotes

#1. ...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.

Barbara Pym

#2. Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink.

Barbara Pym

#3. Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

Barbara Pym

#4. Also, it was the morning and it seemed a little odd to be thinking about poetry before luncheon.

Barbara Pym

#5. It was only sometimes, when a spring day came in the middle of winter, that one had a sudden feeling that nothing was really impossible

Barbara Pym

#6. Mimosa did lose its first freshness too quickly to be worth buying and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's.

Barbara Pym

#7. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

Barbara Pym

#8. Yes! In the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live ALONE,

Barbara Pym

#9. I hope you don't mind tea in mugs,' she said, coming in with a try. 'I told you I was a slut.

Barbara Pym

#10. Inanimate objects were often so much nicer than people.

Barbara Pym

#11. Prudence's flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.

Barbara Pym

#12. However romantically ill John might look, it seemed that he had nothing worse than an unromantic cold.

Barbara Pym

#13. The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he must give a dinner party, however unpretentious, and that day had now arrived for Rupert Stonebird.

Barbara Pym

#14. Yes, I like sitting at a table in the sun,' I agreed, 'but I'm afraid I'm one of those typical English tourists who always wants a cup of tea.

Barbara Pym

#15. In the weeks that had passed since she had met Rupert Stonebird at the vicarage her interest in him had deepened, mainly because she had not seen him again and had therefore been able to build up a more satisfactory picture of him than if she had been able to check with reality.

Barbara Pym

#16. I hesitated at the top of the stairs, feeling nervous and stupid, for this was a situation I had not experienced before, and my training did not seem to be quite equal to it. Also, I suddenly thought of the parrot in a cage and that was distracting.

Barbara Pym

#17. The conversation did not go very well and I began telling him about the people with their trays in the great cafeteria and suggesting that it would have done us more good to go there to be put in mind of our own mortality.

Barbara Pym

#18. for I had observed that men did not usually do things unless they liked doing them.

Barbara Pym

#19. How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.

Barbara Pym

#20. The time left over from these good works was given to 'making a home' for her brother, whom she adored, though she was completely undomesticated and went about it with more enthusiasm than skill.

Barbara Pym

#21. Prudence thanked him, experiencing that feeling of contrition which comes to all of us when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they then perform some kind action.

Barbara Pym

#22. Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles. Surely

Barbara Pym

#23. It's so good for you to think of nothing. I wish you could do it more often.

Barbara Pym

#24. If only one could clear out one's mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one's wardrobe.

Barbara Pym

#25. For although she had been, and still was, very much admired, she had got into the way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that it was becoming almost a bad habit.

Barbara Pym

#26. Ageing, slightly mad and on the threshold of retirement, it was an uneasy combination and it was no wonder that people shied away from her or made only the most perfunctory remarks. It was difficult to imagine what her retirement would be like - impossibe and rather gruesome to speculate on it.

Barbara Pym

#27. Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

Barbara Pym

#28. Perhaps I need some shattering experience to awaken and inspire me, or at least to give me some emotion to recollect in tranquility. But how to get it? Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? ... I expect it will be sit and wait.

Barbara Pym

#29. It seemed so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.

Barbara Pym

#30. Sitting aimlessly in bedrooms- often on the bed itself- is another characteristic feature of the English holidays. The meal was over and it was only twenty five past seven. 'The evening stretches before us,' Viola said gloomily.

Barbara Pym

#31. Well, then, we may as well find somewhere to have tea. After spiritual comes bodily refreshment.

Barbara Pym

#32. Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.

Barbara Pym

#33. If it is true that men only want one thing, Jane asked herself, is it perhaps just to be left to themselves with their soap animals or some other harmless little trifle?

Barbara Pym

#34. I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.

Barbara Pym

#35. This may sound a cynical thing to say, but don't you think men sometimes leave difficulties to be solved by other people or to solve themselves? After

Barbara Pym

#36. Perhaps all love had something of the ridiculous in it.

Barbara Pym

#37. The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

Barbara Pym

#38. It doesn't seem like them, somehow, I said. They don't usually do good by stealth. No, Julian agreed, their left hand usually knows perfectly well what their right hand is doing.

Barbara Pym

#39. I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.

Barbara Pym

#40. I imagine the proverb about too many cooks spoiling the broth can be applied to writing as well as anything else. The poetical or literary broth is better cooked by one person.

Barbara Pym

#41. I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.

Barbara Pym

#42. I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.

Barbara Pym

#43. I think just a cup of tea...' There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria.

Barbara Pym

#44. Robina Fairfax's mouth opened in a smile which revealed teeth that could only have been her own, so variously coloured and oddly shaped were they.

Barbara Pym

#45. Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there ...

Barbara Pym

#46. Perhaps it's better to be unhappy than not to feel anything at all.

Barbara Pym

#47. Jane decided he was certainly beautiful, with brown eyes and a well-shaped nose. It is a refreshing thing for an ordinary-looking woman to look at a beautiful man occasionally and Jane gave herself up to contemplation.

Barbara Pym

#48. Oh, God, yes! You'd hate sharing a kitchen with me. I'm such a slut,' she said, almost proudly.

Barbara Pym

#49. Oh, yes, men are very simple and obvious in some ways, you know. They generally react in the way one would expect and it is often rather a cowardly way. I

Barbara Pym

#50. There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.

Barbara Pym

#51. Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to.

Barbara Pym

#52. in something for him, so I bought some white

Barbara Pym

#53. Dear Mildred,' he smiled, 'you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.

Barbara Pym

#54. If the two women feared that the coming of this date [their retirement] might give some clue to their ages, it was not an occasion for embarrassment because nobody else had been in the least interested, both of them having long ago reached ages beyond any kind of speculation.

Barbara Pym

#55. Well, I haven't really anything to eat at home, I began, but then stopped, as I realised that a dreary revelation of the state of one's larder was hardly the way to respond to an invitation to dinner.

Barbara Pym

#56. There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

Barbara Pym

#57. She had now reached an age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically than one does at nineteen or even at twenty-one.

Barbara Pym

#58. As for his sudden change of heart, he had suddenly remembered the end of Mansfield Park, and how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny. Dulcie must surely know the novel well, and would understand how such things can happen.

Barbara Pym

#59. Once you get into the habit of falling in love you will find that it happens quite often and means less and less,' said

Barbara Pym

#60. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

Barbara Pym

#61. Prue hadn't really been in love with Fabian. Indeed, it was obvious that at times she found him both boring and irritating. But wasn't that what so many marriages were - finding a person boring and irritating and yet loving him? Who could imagine a man who was never boring, or irritating?

Barbara Pym

#62. Just the kind of underclothes a person like me might wear, I thought dejectedly, so there is no need to describe them.

Barbara Pym

#63. When we reached the bus-stop we were a long way behind in the queue and when the bus came it took only half a dozen people. I noticed a group of priests looking down on us from the upper deck and I felt that somehow the Pope and his Dogmas had triumphed after all.

Barbara Pym

#64. Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well read man.

Barbara Pym

#65. I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.

Barbara Pym

#66. it was as if no woman could be really happy even when she was being taken out to dinner. He felt he ought to say something profound, but, naturally enough, nothing profound came out. 'I mean, she leads

Barbara Pym

#67. Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured.

Barbara Pym

#68. It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one's mind.

Barbara Pym

#69. Yes, I love September,' agreed Belinda, guilty at having let her thoughts wander from her guest. 'Michaelmas daisies and blackberries and comforting things like fires in the evening again and knitting.

Barbara Pym

#70. You lose your sense of perspective when you get too close, and the charm goes.

Barbara Pym

#71. We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier ... Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn't your talent for observation.

Barbara Pym

#72. It seems to be a kind of lounge,' she added, tripping over a small footstool. The floor seemed to be littered with them, like toadstools.

Barbara Pym

#73. What a good thing there is no marriage or giving in marriage in the after-life; it will certainly help to smooth things out.

Barbara Pym

#74. but it's a good feeling and one does so like to have that.

Barbara Pym

#75. There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive.It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference , that's all.

Barbara Pym

#76. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ...

Barbara Pym

#77. The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things ... the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

Barbara Pym

#78. My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

Barbara Pym

#79. But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.

Barbara Pym

#80. But now respectable elderly women do not need to excuse themselves for buying brandy or even gin, though it is quite likely that some still do and perhaps one may hope that they always will.

Barbara Pym

#81. How displaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity.

Barbara Pym

#82. A room in Holmhurst was the last thing she'd come to - better to lie down in the wood under the beech leaces and the bracken and wait quietly for death.

Barbara Pym

#83. Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

Barbara Pym