Barbara Pym > Quotes

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

“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, Less Than Angels

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.”
― Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

“Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.”
― Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym

“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, 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

“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

“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, Crampton Hodnet

“I hope you don’t mind tea in mugs,’ she said, coming in with a tray. ‘I told you I was a slut.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“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

“But surely liking the same things for dinner is one of the deepest and most lasting things you could possibly have in common with anyone,' argued Dr. Parnell. 'After all, the emotions of the heart are very transitory, or so I believe; I should think it makes one much happier to be well-fed than well-loved.”
― Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle

“...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, Excellent Women

“I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one’s struggles.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“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

“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

“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

“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, An Unsuitable Attachment

“Perhaps all love had something of the ridiculous in it.”
― Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

“Inanimate objects were often so much nicer than people.”
― Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet

“Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“You lose your sense of perspective when you get too close, and the charm goes.”
― Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet

“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