Barbara Pym Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

Oh how absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself! Everybody should try it.

Barbara Pym
Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well-read man.

Barbara Pym
There was something about the idea of an orphan that brought out the best in Humphrey, that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.

Barbara Pym
Miss Doggett again looked puzzled; it was as if she had heard that men only wanted one thing, but had forgotten for the moment what it was.

Barbara Pym
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
She experienced all the cosiness and irritation which can come from living with thoroughly nice people with whom one has nothing in common.

Barbara Pym
Everything he didn't particularly want to do was described by Humphrey as 'good experience'.

Barbara Pym
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
[The woman] paused and seemed to take a deep breath. 'You see,' she declared. 'I am Tom Mallow's aunt.' Catherine's first instinct was to burst out laughing. She wondered why there was something slightly absurd about aunts; perhaps it was because one thought of them as dear, comfortable creatures, somehow lacking in dignity and prestige.

Barbara Pym
He did not find it easy to write to Prudence. To begin with, he had never been much of a letter-writer, and then her letters were of such a high literary standard, so much embellished with suitable quotations that he found it quite impossible to equal them.

Barbara Pym
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
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
I suppose we are apt to attribute to them all the virtues they preach.

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

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
What is the future of my kind of writing? … Perhaps in retirement … a quieter, narrower kind of life can be worked out and adopted. Bounded by English literature and the Anglican Church and small pleasures like sewing and choosing material for this uncertain summer.

Barbara Pym
Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things - enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which.

Barbara Pym
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
Father G. was often obliged to enter houses where people were on the point of death or had already died; indeed he preferred this type of situation to normal parish visiting, with its awkward conversation and the inevitable cups of tea and sweet biscuits.

Barbara Pym
Inanimate objects were often so much nicer than people, she thought. What person, for example, could possibly be so comforting as one's bed?

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

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

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

Barbara Pym
This was one of Cassandra's special virtues, that she anticipated her husband's wishes almost before he knew what they were.

Barbara Pym
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
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