I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.
BARBARA PYMHow absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.
More Barbara Pym Quotes
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I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.
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There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.
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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 -
Perhaps I need some shattering experience to awaken and inspire me, or at least to give me some emotion to recollect in tranquility. But how to get it? Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? . . . I expect it will be sit and wait.
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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.
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What a good thing there is no marriage or giving in marriage in the after-life; it will certainly help to smooth things out.
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I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.
BARBARA PYM -
Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.
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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 -
How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.
BARBARA PYM -
She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.
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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.
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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.
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There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.
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Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.
BARBARA PYM






