Quotes from Barbara Pym

Men took themselves so seriously and seemed to insist on arguing even the most trivial points.

She was dressed, as usual, in an odd assortment of clothes, most of which had belonged to other people.

Miss Morrow,' said Miss Doggett in a warning tone, 'you are not a woman of the world. You cannot possibly know what goes on outside Leamington Lodge.

October. She knew that she dared not pray for humility, to be granted the grace of humility, it being such a precious thing, but when others were decorating the church for Harvest Festival she chose a humble, even humiliating task, emptying the cat's tray, bundling the soiled Katlitta into a newspaper. Yet had she even chosen it – it was just something that had to be done. Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

The S. D. D. comes out in June, I'm told. Prepublication sales have been quite good and Cape are reissuing STG and Less Than Angels. I don't think I shall ever be liable for VAT but I have bought a new account book (as advised in the last no. of The Author – I expect sales have shot up!). But the main thing is to feel that I am now regarded as a novelist, a good feeling after all those years of 'This is well written, but…

Me apresuraré a añadir que no me parezco en absoluto a Jane Eyre, que debe de haber hecho concebir esperanzas a tantas mujeres feas que refieren su historia en primera persona...

Oh, God, yes! You'd hate sharing a kitchen with me. I'm such a slut,' she said, almost proudly.

Marriage isn't necessarily the answer to all one's problems,' said Viola evasively, from which Dulcie concluded that he had not yet proposed to her.

Nearly twenty-past one!' said Harriet, as they sat down to their meal. 'The Archdeacon has delayed everything. I suppose he imagined Emily would be cooking.' 'I don't suppose he thought about it at all, men don't as a rule,' said Belinda, 'they just expect meals to appear on the table and they do.

Too late for coffee, too early for drink -though when was it ever too early for a glass of Tio Pepe, slightly chilled?

Well, then, we may as well find somewhere to have tea. After spiritual comes bodily refreshment.

Rupert hardly knew what to say. If only he could take her to bed with him, he thought as they approached the pensione, so much might be smoothed out there. But perhaps it was just as well that circumstances made it impossible at this moment, for that might bring about even deeper complications.

And somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.

Oh, the strange and wonderful things that men could make women do! thought Jane. She remembered how once, long ago, she herself had started to learn Swedish—there was still a grammar now thick with dust lying in the attic; and when she had first met Nicholas she had tried Greek. And now here was her own daughter caught up in the higher flights of Geography! He seemed a nice young man, but that was only the least one could say. Was it also the most?

Leonora liked to think of her life as calm of mind, all passion spent, or, more rarely, as emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Yet there was no reason why one's death should not, in its own way, be as elegant as one's life, and one would do everything possible to make it so.

Piers was not to be considered at all, even had he been the kind of man who might marry.

And yet why should she not be allowed her occasional joys, such very mild ones, which were mostly remembrance of things past?

Perhaps it's better to be unhappy than not to feel anything at all,' I said.

Later that evening, as we sat in the garden having drinks, I caught Harry looking at me with a kind of doggy devotion in his eyes. I leaned back in my chair, well satisfied, both with my drink in such pleasant surroundings and with his devotion. It seemed like a balm to heal the little wound inflicted by Piers's unkindness.

It seemed so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.

I sat down at the table without any very high hopes, for both Julian and Winifred, as is often the way with good, unworldly people, hardly noticed what they ate or drank, so that a meal with them was a doubtful pleasure.

The lines on Rugby Chapel…I wish I could remember some of them now, but English Literature stopped at Wordsworth when I was up at Oxford, and somehow one doesn't remember things so well that one read since.