Barbara Pym > Quotes

“Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink.”
― Barbara Pym

“She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ...”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet In Autumn

“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, Excellent Women

“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

“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

“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

“The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“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

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

“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

“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

“You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish. I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“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, Excellent Women

“Perhaps all love had something of the ridiculous in it.”
― Barbara Pym

“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

“One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet In Autumn

“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, Jane and Prudence

“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, Excellent Women

“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, Excellent Women

“One wouldn't believe there could be so many people, and one must love them all.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“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

“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

“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, Jane and Prudence

“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, Excellent Women

“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, Excellent Women

“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, Excellent Women

“I wonder if he kissed her, Jane thought. She was surprised to hear that they had had what seemed to be quite an intelligent conversation, for she had never found Fabian very much good in that line. She had a theory that this was why he tended to make love to woman - because he couldn't really think of much to say to them.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“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, Jane and Prudence