Quartet in Autumn Quotes

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

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

“I think just a cup of tea...' There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“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, Quartet in Autumn

“So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“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, Quartet in Autumn

“Row, where he sat brooding in a curtained”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“Why had this not happened? Because she had thought that love was a necessary ingredient for marriage? Now, having locked around her for forty years, she was not so sure. All those years wasted, looking for love!”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“Yet, she sometimes wondered, might not the experience of ‘not having’ be regarded as something with its own validity?”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“It was dreadful, Marcia felt, the way so many people wanted to know one’s business and, when she did not respond, to tell one about their own.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“Two women could never share the same kitchen, she told herself, forgetting for the moment that she never really used the kitchen except to boil a kettle or make a piece of toast.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realise that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“Four people on the verge of retirement, each one of us living alone, and without any close relative near – that’s us.”
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

“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, Quartet in Autumn

“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, Quartet in Autumn