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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

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Barbara Pym
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: June 2
Died: 1980
Died: January 11
Author
Autobiographer
Novelist
Oswestry
Shropshire
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym
Alive
Oxford
Difficult
North
Tell
Illness
Sometimes
Sick
People
Difference
Dead
Differences
Either

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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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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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Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.
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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.
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Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.
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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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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.
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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.
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The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.
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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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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.
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I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.
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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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