Quotes from Barbara Pym

Like so many men, he needed a woman stronger than himself, for behind the harsh cragginess of the Easter Island façade cowered the small boy, uncertain of himself.

Jane decided he was certainly beautiful, with brown eyes and a well-shaped nose. It is a refreshing thing for an ordinary-looking woman to look at a beautiful man occasionally and Jane gave herself up to contemplation.

He had sometimes attempted to keep a diary himself, the kind of record of his daily life that could rival famous clerical diarists of the past, a nineteen-seventies Woodforde or Kilvert. What was he to write about the events of this morning? 'My sister Daphne made a gooseberry tart and told me that she was going to live on the outskirts of Birmingham'? Could that possibly be of interest to readers of the next century?

However romantically ill John might look, it seemed that he had nothing worse than an unromantic cold.

Oh the benison of it, she thought, for she seemed to need comfort now, not only because she was tired after the journey and far away from John, but because she had admitted to herself that she loved him, had let her love sweep over her like a kind of illness, 'giving in' to flu, conscious only of the present moment.

porque yo había observado que los hombres no solían hacer cosas a menos que les gustara hacerlas.

I suppose by the time one is seventy one can say confidently and from a personal experiece that things will pass. At thirty one is still living experimentally, guessing that they will yet almost hoping that they will not.

I have often wondered whether it is really a good thing to be honest by nature and upbringing; certainly it is not a good thing socially, for I feel sure that the tea-party would have been more successful had I not explained that the tea was really Indian which I had unfortunately made too weak.

It was no doubt significant that Mary Beamish should have the novels of Miss Goudge while Piers had those of Miss Compton-Burnett,

Dear Mildred,' he smiled, 'you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.

When we reached the bus-stop we were a long way behind in the queue and when the bus came it took only half a dozen people. I noticed a group of priests looking down on us from the upper deck and I felt that somehow the Pope and his Dogmas had triumphed after all.

At Christmas, Dulcie thought, people seemed to lose their status as individuals in their own right and became, as it were, diminished in stature, mere units in families, when for the rest of the year they were bold and original and often the kind of people it is impossible to imagine having such ordinary everyday things as parents. Christmas put people in their places, sent them back to the nursery or cradle, almost.

A youngish woman of about thirty-five who had come in to shelter froma heavy shower of rain, pricked up her ears and looked away from the book she had not been reading. To realize that two men could apparently be quarrelling almost publicly over a woman in this unchivalrous age sent her on her way with new hope.

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.

I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people's business, and if she is also a clergyman's daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her.

If only one could clear out one's mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one's wardrobe...

On the threshold of sixty,' mused Dr. Parnell. 'That's a good age for a man to marry. He needs a woman to help him into his grave.

When we grow older we lack the fine courage of youth, and even an ordinary task like making a pullover for somebody we love or used to love seems too dangerous to be undertaken.

People do seem to be ashamed of admitting that they read poetry,' said Jane, 'unless they have a degree in English—it is permissible then.

Miss Limpsett was older, uglier and more untidy than I had remembered. She had obviously had a hard and tiring day, for her grey hair was awry as if she had been running her fingers through it, and there was ink on her fingers. Her face was haggard, and it occurred to me that it was not only this day which had been hard and tiring, but all days and even life itself.

I feel I can almost count as another woman,' said Nicholas, perhaps rather too lightly, for he was still thinking more of his tobacco leaves than of Miss Doggett's mission.

Four people on the verge of retirement, each one of us living alone, and without any close relative near – that's us.

T]heir cats will be looked after too -- one only hopes Daisy won't put in more food for them than for the humans.' Faustina [the cat] looked up from her saucer, her dark face made all the more reproachful by its beard of milk.

Yet, when one came to think of it, the only flowers that were really perfect were those, like the peonies that went so well with one's charming room, that possessed the added grace of having been presented to oneself.