A first sampling of Barbara Pym, from her novel Excellent Women:

I had observed that men usually did not do things unless they liked doing them. (9) 

But it was a women’s program and they all seemed so married and splendid, their lives so full and yet so well organized, that I felt more than usually spinsterish and useless.  (28)

Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.  (44) 

Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with no one to watch one’s struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite someone eating spaghetti? (96)

I told myself that, after all, life is 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. (101) 

I always used to think that there’s only one flaw with Pride and Prejudice, and that is the absence of a 30-page sex scene between Elizabeth and Darcy.

- Martin Amis

Dame Ethel devotes the second half of her book to her adventures in Egypt, including the laying-out of a nine-hole golf course in the Nubian desert and her investigation into the nature of a hermaphrodite. But she does not say whether the hermaphrodite played golf, or what was its handicap!

-Agate, Ego (82)

Romanticism: In Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked—engagé, as the 20C existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any  set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensible. They rise out the people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy.

–Barzun, Dawn to Decadence (491)

Theology: Ces auteurs, me repartit-il, n'ont point cherche dans l'Ecriture ce qu'il faut croire, mais ce qu'ils croient eux-mêmes; ils ne l'ont point regardée comme un livre ou étaient contenus les dogmes qu'ils devaient recevoir mais comme un ouvrage qui pourrait donner de l'autorité a leurs propres idées.

-Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes (299)

'Mais c'est quoi, la dialetique?' 'C'est l'art et la manier de toujours retomber sur ses patte, mon vieux!'

-Jorge Semprun, Quel Beau Dimanche

Financially, my knowledge of Spanish has yielded me exactly ten-and-sixpence—for the translation of a stupid aria! But I have never given it up, and I find that running over Spanish irregular verbs is an infallible cure for insomnia.

–Edward Agate in James Agate's Ego (73)

L'histoire accueille et renouvelle ces gloires déshéritées; elle donne nouvelle vie a ces morts, les ressuscite. Sa justice associe ainsi ceux qui n'ont pas vécu en même temps, fait réparation a plusieurs qui n'avaient paru qu'un moment pour disparaitre. Ils vivent maintenant avec nous qui nous sentons leurs parents, leurs amis. Ainsi se fait une famille, une cité commune entre les vivants et les morts.

-Michelet, Preface to Histoire du XIXe Siécle, Vol II. history

And so it was necessary to teach people not to think and make judgments, to compel them to see the non-existent, and to argue the opposite of what was obvious to everyone.

-Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago politics

Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. –E.M. Cioran health

Took Leo to supper at the Trocadero and was very glad when he only wanted to drink beer. This enabled me to have my usual pint of champagne. I am dead without it. But I cannot afford to buy champagne for other people. If, therefore, I invite anybody to a meal--which owing to the impecuniousity of my friends I must always do--either I must behave like a cad or remain dead. I prefer the former. Leo said that to get the best out of a love-affair one should never ask for more passion than the beloved one is competent to provide. It is impossible to convey the amount of erotic dissolusion in Leo's voice as he said this. Wordsworth would have called it dissapointment recollected in tranquillity. Apropos of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle, Leo defined History as "the way things get about."

-A Shorter Ego I (41), James Agate money love history

Heart & Mind: What is sentimentality? If one asks somebody who ought to know, one is told: an excess of emotion; or again, misplaced emotion. Both answers miss the point. Who can judge when emotion is too much? People vary not only in the power to feel and to express feeling, but also in their imagination, so that a stolid nature will deem it excessive as soon as love or grief is expressed vividly or strongly. Shakespeare is full of “exaggerated” emotion, but never sentimental. The same remark applies to the other answer. When is feeling misplaced? at the sufferings of a tragic hero? at the death of a pet? at the destruction of a masterpiece? One may argue that any emotion out of the common should be restrained in public, but that is another question, one of social manners that has nothing to do with a feeling’s fitness to its occasion. The diagnostic test must be found somewhere else.

Sentimentality is feeling that shuts out action, real or potential. It is self-centered and a species of make-believe. William James gives the example of the woman who sheds tears at the heroine’s plight on the stage while her coachman is freezing outside the theatre. So far is the sentimentalist from being one whose emotions exceed the legal limit that he may be charged with deficient energy in what he feels; it does not propel him. That is why he finds pleasure in grief and when he is in love never proposes.

-Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (411)

Politics: There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, further from the truth (…) Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice.

– J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in 18C England

Certains auteurs, parlant de leurs ouvrages, dissent: ‘Mon livre, mon commentaire, mon histoire, etc.’ Ils feraient mieux de dire: ‘Notre livre, notre commentaire, notre histoire, etc.’ Vu que d’ordinaire il y a plus en cela du bien d’autrui que du leur. 

–Pascal, Pensees books