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Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.

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

Differences Oxford People
Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.
BARBARA PYM

Kind Pleasure Writing
I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.
BARBARA PYM

Book Hand Reading
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

Giving Good Helping Things
I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.
BARBARA PYM

English Essential Even Love Something Song
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

May People Trying
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

Consciousness Hours Novel Occur Stream
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

Cooking Funny Home Things
Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.
BARBARA PYM

Drink Librarian Smell
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

Cooks Imagine Writing
Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.
BARBARA PYM

Library People Upset
The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.
BARBARA PYM

Paper People Three
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

Doors House People
She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.
BARBARA PYM

Always Novel Reader Unashamed
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

Important Mind Odd
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

Lonely Men Self

Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.

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Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.

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Popular Authors

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