"Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink."
— Barbara Pym

"I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading."
— Barbara Pym (Excellent Women)

"'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 (An Unsuitable Attachment)

"I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it."
— Barbara Pym (Jane and Prudence)

"She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ..."
— Barbara Pym (Quartet in Autumn)

"Perhaps there can be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look, 'Do we need tea? she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury...' She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. I mumbled something about making a joke and that of course one needed tea always, at every hour of the day or night."
— Barbara Pym (Excellent Women)

"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

""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 (No Fond Return of Love)

"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

"Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there..."
— Barbara Pym

"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 (Excellent Women)

"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 (Excellent Women)

""Mr Boultbee seems to have done us a good turn," said Nicholas. "I gather his sermons were not much liked."

"No; we got very tired of Africa and I didn't feel that what he told us rang quite true. He said that one African chief had had a thousand wives. I found that a little difficult to believe."

"Well, we know what men are," said Jane casually, surprised that Miss Dogget, with her insistence on men only wanting one thing, should have found this difficult to believe."
— Barbara Pym (Jane and Prudence)

"But of course, she remembered, that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed these unremarkable beings. For most men, when one came to think of it, were undistinguished to look at, if not positively ugly. Fabian was an exception, and perhaps love affairs with handsome men tended to be less stable because so much less sympathy and imagination were needed on the woman's part?"
— Barbara Pym (Jane and Prudence)

"'Brides over thirty shouldn't wear white,' said Jessie, who had now joined them.

'Well, they may have a perfect right to,' said Jane.

'A woman over thirty might not like you to think that,' said Jessie quickly. 'There can be something shameful about flaunting one's lack of experience.'"
— Barbara Pym (Jane and Prudence)