Jilly Cooper > Quotes

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.”
― Jilly Cooper

“I'm bored stiff by ballet. i can't bear those muscular white legs like unbaked plaited loaves, and I get quite hysterical every time one of the women sticks out her leg at right angles, and the man suddenly grabs it and walks round in a circle as though he were opening a tin.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super Too

“In our vile English climate, rough winds shake not only the darling buds of May, but of June, July, August and September as well.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“I loathe the telephone - vile, shrill-voiced intruder. i'd never answer it at all if I didn't feel I might be missing something: a million-pound offer from a film company or Robert Mitchum asking me out to lunch. I hate the element of uncertainty - you never know if it's going to be a friend or a foe on the line. I wish they'd invent a telephone which turned green like a breath-test when it was an enemy ringing, so I needn't answer it.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“I'm going to get absolutely plastered tonight, darling. i love you so much, I want to see two of you.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“Our house is so difficult to find that people always arrive late, which means that by the time we go into dinner, I've had so many dry Martinis I'm practically under the piano, and it no longer seems to matter that I haven't put the potatoes on.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“A man from the Electricity Board has been rabbiting on like Mr Darcy about the inferiority of our connections and says the whole place will have to be rewired.”
― Jilly Cooper, Rivals

“We all need the pipe dream of writing the great novel, or winning the pools, or becoming managing director and kicking all our colleagues in the teeth. The world is deep and dark and full of tigers, and we need those shimmering white castles in the air to creep into when life gets unbearable.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“The thing that first knocked me out about Amsterdam, even on the coldest, greyest February day, was its beauty. The houses rise, red and grey, and seem to float swanlike above the canals. The sheen on the water is olive-green, and mallards with their brilliant emerald heads slide gravely under the bridges. if you close your eyes you can see the city peopled again by those who built it - seventeenth century burghers in their black coats, rich from trading with the Indies.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Superlative

“People are going to be sent to prison for saying somebody’s common soon, aren’t they? Really. You can’t say anybody’s fat, you can’t say anybody’s anything, now. Not that one wants to say people are fat, but mind you, they are huge, aren’t they. Enormous. Enormous. I hate people being hurt. But nobody can say anything now. Anyway, enough of that. And all this [anti] wolf-whistling. I love being wolf-whistled at. I’m that generation. All contributions gratefully received.”
― Jilly Cooper

“gorped”
― Jilly Cooper, Polo

“To bring the balloon of the mind that bellies and drags in the wind, as Yeats had so perfectly put it, into its narrow shed.”
― Jilly Cooper, Rivals

“I simply adore Princeton. To begin with it is so beautiful : ravishing white clapboard houses with dark green shutters, verandas weighed down with great amethyst watrfalls of wisaria, mists of white dogwood and syringa; copper beeches so shiny that they must be put outside the gardens to be polished every night.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super Too

“I adore watching other people in restaurants, beautiful people toying with steak tartare, hoping to be recognized, married couples eating but not talking, lovers eating each other, illicit couples ducking nevously behind the celery and the gristicks every time the door opens, children doing more whining than dining, storing food in the corners of their cheeks like cherubs at the corner of old maps, then suddenly spraying spinach all over the snow-white tablecloth.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“the looniness of the long distance runner - pounding along country lanes, so anxious to lop off seconds he never stops to marvel at a field of buttercups or a flock of geese against the sky.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“What was the point of becoming famous anyway? The Press dumped on you when you were alive, and pigeons when you were dead.”
― Jilly Cooper

“Between towering beeches, like ice cliffs, the lake glittered in the moonlight, arctic white along the frozen edges, but with a dark badger stripe of flowing water down the centre.”
― Jilly Cooper

“Father-in-law comes to stay, goes to local church and returns saying he will spend the rest of his life translating New English Bible back into English.”
― Jilly Cooper, Supercooper

“Hunting’s like adultery,’ he said. ‘Endless hanging about, interspersed with frenzied moments of excitement, very expensive and morally indefensible.”
― Jilly Cooper, Riders

“Lucky, lucky”
― Jilly Cooper, Appassionata

“He thought of Hilary's tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands.”
― Jilly Cooper, Riders

“Out in the country, autumn was busy daubing the woods in orange and yellow. Rooks and gulls argued over newly ploughed fields. Behind veils of little cobwebs, the hedgerows blushed with berries.”
― Jilly Cooper

“straw or a speck of dust anywhere.”
― Jilly Cooper, Rivals & Riders

“I then realized I’d left my muck bucket at Marcia’s and brought someone else’s bag instead.”
― Jilly Cooper, Prudence

“What a disastrous dog owner I've been. What a squandering, through my soppy indulgence and inability to discipline a flea, of two marvellous dogs [who were put down].”
― Jilly Cooper, The Common Years

“Never liked it. Silly girl lying in the water”
― Jilly Cooper, Rivals

“She was a good if sloppy writer.”
― Jilly Cooper, Riders

“wicked, dangerously direct eyes.”
― Jilly Cooper, Riders

“mostly to stop blacks killing blacks, they’re so tribal”
― Jilly Cooper, Mount!

“Will Repay.”
― Jilly Cooper, Mount!