Lettice Cooper > Quotes

“They knew that flowers die and leaves fall, but they could not carry that knowledge into their own lives; the acceptance was beyond them. Sighing for the blossom, they missed the fruit, growing and ripening. Regretting the fruit, they did not see the delicate tracery of bare boughs against a winter sky.”
― Lettice Cooper, The New House

“I suppose, Maurice thought, there is no personal immortality! All that remained of his father was this vivid image in his own mind, in Rhoda's, in his mother's; less vivid in the minds of others, but alive still in an incident, a word, a gesture that had left its print. Here on the end of the club fender his father had sat twelve months ago, intervening in a dispute that was growing heated, laughing at the two disputants, making them laugh unwillingly. Once he had looked across at Maurice, and smiled, sharing the absurdity. Maurice had loved him at that moment, because he was never pompous, did not take offence, never stood upon his own dignity, saw clear. And all that remained of that living, breathing figure on the end of the club fender was the memory growing fainter, like a ripple of sound spreading out in widening rings through the air.”
― Lettice Cooper, The New House

“You can always get a following for piracy or a crusade, because people can get hot over either of 'em. It's because fair play's cool you can't get a mob to run after it. It doesn't satisfy primitive greed, or the Christian ideal of self-immolation. But it's the only single damn' thing with any sense in it, all the same, and it'll always be there in the middle while the pendulum swings backwards and forwards, so I expect we shall worry out something decent in the end.”
― Lettice Cooper

“They say there is only one half-hour when a pear is at its best for eating. There is one time in your life when you can do a thing best for yourself and everyone else. If you don't do it then, you don't do it at all, or you do it with loss and damage! Hilary had always said that the difference between an actor and an amateur actor was in the timing.”
― Lettice Cooper, The New House