"Excellent Women", "Crazy Rich Asians"

[fiefoe]

Barbara Pym is pretty much what I expected. The anti marriage plot.

• “They've moved me to a new office and I don't like it at all. Different pigeons come to the window.”
• 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.
• 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.
• One wouldn't believe there could be so many people, and one must love them all.
• Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?
• 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.
• “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.”
• “I always feel that one ought to give men the opportunity for self-sacrifice; their natures are so much less noble than ours.”
• 'The engagement is broken off,' said Julian flatly, laying down the ping-pong bats rather carefully on the kitchen table.
• People did tend to leave the washing up  on their dramatic occassions of life.
• 'Personally, I can't imagine anything I should like less than the love of a good woman. It would be life - oh - something very cosy and stifling and unglamorous, a large grey blanket - perhaps an Army blanket.' 'Or like a white rabbit thrust suddenly into your arms,' I suggested, feeling the glow of wine in me.

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Kevin Kwan. Eh. The only funny bit was "ooh and aya".