Barbara Pym - People Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy 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
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
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
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