Barbara Pym

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

“After all, life was like that for most of us – the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.”

“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.”

“Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.”

“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.”

“Yes, I like sitting at a table in the sun,' I agreed, 'but I'm afraid I'm one of those typical English tourists who always wants a cup of tea.”

“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.”

“Perhaps all love had something of the ridiculous in it.”

“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.”

“Robina Fairfax's mouth opened in a smile which revealed teeth that could only have been her own, so variously coloured and oddly shaped were they.”

“The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he must give a dinner party, however unpretentious, and that day had now arrived for Rupert Stonebird.”

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

“In the weeks that had passed since she had met Rupert Stonebird at the vicarage her interest in him had deepened, mainly because she had not seen him again and had therefore been able to build up a more satisfactory picture of him than if she had been able to check with reality.”

“She had now reached an age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically than one does at nineteen or even at twenty-one.”

“Jane felt that he would write from the depths of a wretchedness that would not necessarily be insincere because its outward signs were so theatrical. Pesumably attractive men and probably woman too must always be suffering in this way; they must so often have to reject and cast aside love, and perhaps even practice did not always make them ruthless and cold-blooded enough to do it without feeling any qualms.”

“He is a brilliant man, said Miss Doggett. She helped him a good deal in his work, I think. Mrs. Bonner says that she even learned to type so that she could type his manuscripts for him. 'Oh, then he had to marry her,' said Miss Morrow sharply. 'That kind of devotion is worse than blackmail - a man has no escape from that.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I wonder if he kissed her, Jane thought. She was surprised to hear that they had had what seemed to be quite an intelligent conversation, for she had never found Fabian very much good in that line. She had a theory that this was why he tended to make love to woman - because he couldn't really think of much to say to them.”

“Prudence thanked him, experiencing that feeling of contrition which comes to all of us when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they then perform some kind action.”

“For although she had been, and still was, very much admired, she had got into the way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that it was becoming almost a bad habit.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Well, I haven't really anything to eat at home, I began, but then stopped, as I realised that a dreary revelation of the state of one's larder was hardly the way to respond to an invitation to dinner.”

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

“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.”

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

“Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.”

“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.”

“Mimosa did lose its first freshness too quickly to be worth buying and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One wouldn't believe there could be so many people, and one must love them all.”

“We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier. . . . Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn't your talent for observation.”

“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.”

“Sitting aimlessly in bedrooms- often on the bed itself- is another characteristic feature of the English holidays. The meal was over and it was only twenty five past seven. 'The evening stretches before us,' Viola said gloomily.”

“Brides over thirty shouldn't wear white,' said Jessie, who had now joined them.Well, they may have a perfect right to,' said Jane.A woman over thirty might not like you to think that,' said Jessie quickly. 'There can be something shameful about flaunting one's lack of experience.”

“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?”

“Mr Boultbee seems to have done us a good turn," said Nicholas. "I gather his sermons were not much liked."No; we got very tired of Africa and I didn't feel that what he told us rang quite true. He said that one African chief had had a thousand wives. I found that a little difficult to believe."Well, we know what men are," said Jane casually, surprised that Miss Dogget, with her insistence on men only wanting one thing, should have found this difficult to believe.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things - enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which.”

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

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

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

“Perhaps there can be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look, 'Do we need tea? she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury...' She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. I mumbled something about making a joke and that of course one needed tea always, at every hour of the day or night.”

“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.”

“As for his sudden change of heart, he had suddenly remembered the end of Mansfield Park, and how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny. Dulcie must surely know the novel well, and would understand how such things can happen.”

“One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.”