Top 90 Barbara Pym Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.”

— Barbara Pym

2. “Of course it’s alright for librarians to smell of drink.”

— Barbara Pym

3. “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

4. “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

5. “The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.”

— Barbara Pym

6. “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

7. “If only one could clear out one’s mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one’s wardrobe.”

— Barbara Pym

8. “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

9. “I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.”

— Barbara Pym

10. “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

11. “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.”

— Barbara Pym

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

— Barbara Pym

13. “How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.”

— Barbara Pym

14. “A novel of the kind that Prudence enjoyed, well written and tortuous, with a good dash of culture and the inevitable unhappy or indefinite ending, which was so like life.”

— Barbara Pym

15. “You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish. I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.”

— Barbara Pym

16. “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

17. “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

18. “I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.”

— Barbara Pym

19. “If it is true that men only want one thing, Jane asked herself, is it perhaps just to be left to themselves with their soap animals or some other harmless little trifle?”

— Barbara Pym

20. “So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read ‘To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children’. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.”

— Barbara Pym

21. “I think just a cup of tea... ′ There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria.”

— Barbara Pym

22. “Belinda decided that she could miss doing her room with a clear conscience, as there were so many more important things to be done. It was unlikely that Miss Liversedge would be visiting them and putting them to shame by writing ‘E. Liversedge’ with her finger, as she had once done when Emily had neglected to dust the piano.”

— Barbara Pym

23. “Oh, yes, men are very simple and obvious in some ways, you know. They generally react in the way one would expect and it is often rather a cowardly way.”

— Barbara Pym

24. “They’ve moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all. Different pigeons come to the window.”

— Barbara Pym

25. “I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.”

— Barbara Pym

26. “Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one’s struggles.”

— Barbara Pym

27. “She had been feeling that things were pretty desperate if one found oneself talking about and almost quoting Matthew Arnold to comparative strangers, though anything was better than having to pretend you had winter and summer curtains when you had just curtains.”

— Barbara Pym

28. “Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?”

— Barbara Pym

29. “Once you get into the habit of falling in love you will find that it happens quite often and means less and less.”

— Barbara Pym

30. “Yes, I love September,’ agreed Belinda, guilty at having let her thoughts wander from her guest. ‘Michaelmas daisies and blackberries and comforting things like fires in the evening again and knitting.”

— Barbara Pym

31. “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.”

— Barbara Pym

32. “But of course, she remembered, that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed these unremarkable beings. For most men, when one came to think of it, were undistinguished to look at, if not positively ugly. Fabian was an exception, and perhaps love affairs with handsome men tended to be less stable because so much less sympathy and imagination were needed on the woman’s part?”

— Barbara Pym

33. “This may sound a cynical thing to say, but don’t you think men sometimes leave difficulties to be solved by other people or to solve themselves?”

— Barbara Pym

34. “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.”

— Barbara Pym

35. “It seems to be a kind of lounge,′ she added, tripping over a small footstool. The floor seemed to be littered with them, like toadstools.”

— Barbara Pym

36. “Yes, life has to go on, and I suppose a cup of tea does make it seem to be doing that more than anything.”

— Barbara Pym

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

— Barbara Pym

38. “She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine – for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen’s heroines – and ‘To The North’ was her favourite novel.”

— Barbara Pym

39. “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?”

— Barbara Pym

40. “Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.”

— Barbara Pym

41. “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.”

— Barbara Pym

42. “It was a cold November day and she had dressed herself up in layers of cardigans and covered the whole lot with her old tweed coat, the one she might have used for feeding the chickens in.”

— Barbara Pym

43. “But surely liking the same things for dinner is one of the deepest and most lasting things you could possibly have in common with anyone,′ argued Dr. Parnell. ‘After all, the emotions of the heart are very transitory, or so I believe; I should think it makes one much happier to be well-fed than well-loved.”

— Barbara Pym

44. “Prudence’s flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.”

— Barbara Pym

45. “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

46. “I forebore to remark that women like me really expected very little – nothing, almost.”

— Barbara Pym

47. “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.”

— Barbara Pym

48. “It’s so good for you to think of nothing. I wish you could do it more often.”

— Barbara Pym

49. “Prue hadn’t really been in love with Fabian. Indeed, it was obvious that at times she found him both boring and irritating. But wasn’t that what so many marriages were – finding a person boring and irritating and yet loving him? Who could imagine a man who was never boring, or irritating?”

— Barbara Pym

50. “She had always been an unashamed reader of novels...”

— Barbara Pym