Artemis Cooper > Quotes

“One has to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days. His children might take a certain pride in their ancient lineage, but they also made it clear that the world had moved on and they planned to move with it. Then a scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. he is polite, cheerful, and cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped this part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.”
― Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

“Repetitive experience can be brutalizing,’ she wrote. ‘The less I understood my experiences”
― Artemis Cooper, Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence

“why did Hilly let this happen? Why did she leave her sons in the care of the woman who had usurped her place? One can only assume that as they grew older and more overtly male”
― Artemis Cooper, Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence

“Paddy explained his increasingly wild behaviour as ‘A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature’,”
― Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

“world. New experiences overlaid the old grooves of the record; but on some emotional level she remained immature”
― Artemis Cooper, Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence

“He had a heart when he cared to use it; but on the whole”
― Artemis Cooper, Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence