Diana Cooper Quotes
Diana Cooper delivers bold, witty musings on life and courage, urging you to leap before you look.
-
You have never, I think, known real Grief-panic, melancholia, madness, night-sweats, we've all known for most of our lives-you and me particularly. I'm not sure you know human love in the way I do. You have faith and mysticism-intense inner interests-a diverting, virile mind-gusto for vengeance and destruction if necessary, a fancy-a gospel. What you can't imagine is a creature with a certain iridescent aura and nothing within but a beating frightened heart built round and for Duff. . . For two days I am quite alone-in these empty rooms with one thought one prayer-'let it end now'-an absurd feminine desire to die in the same way exactly as Duff. [ I have now a ] fearlessness of death-so let it come now before custom of living disinclines me for dying.
-
It has always been my temptation to put myself in other people's shoes: even into a horse's shoes as he strains before the heavy dray; into a ballerina's points as she feels age weigh upon her spring; into Cinderella's slippers as she danced till midnight; into the jackboot that kicks; into the Tommy's boots that tramp; into the magic seven-leaguers. With experience of age I have learned to control this habit of sympathy which deforms truth.
-
It's nerve and brass, audace and disrespect, and leaping-before-you-look and what-the-hellism, that must be developed.
-
First you are young; then you are middle-aged; then you are old; then you are wonderful.
-
Age wins and one must learn to grow old. I must learn to walk this long unlovely wintry way, looking for spectacles, shunning the cruel looking-glass, laughing at my clumsiness before others mistakenly condole, not expecting gallantry yet disappointed to receive none, apprehending every ache of shaft of pain, alive to blinding flashes of mortality, unarmed, totally vulnerable.
-
You find something agreeable in almost everyone. I am put off by anything not wholly agreeable. ~ Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Cooper.
-
It was reported that the fireworks were beginning and Diana, ever enthusiastic, led the procession to the roof. I was bringing up the rear, had reached the top floor and was about to climb the ladder that led up from it, when I heard the sound of shattered glass followed, after what seemed to me a long interval, by the sound of a falling body. I opened a door from behind which the noise seemed to come and looked into a narrow box-room, on the floor of which Diana was lying. She had fallen through a skylight about twenty-five feet from the floor. The opening was so narrow that the large hat she was wearing remained on the roof. She had broken her thigh... This was not an auspicious beginning to our married life. ~ Duff Cooper in Old Men Forget (1955)
-
Age is an ugly thing, and it goes on getting worse.
-
It helped me in the air to keep my small mind contained in earthly human limits, not lost in vertiginous space and elements unknown.
-
“Sit quietly, on your own or with others, and decide where you wish to send the energy and what quality you wish to send. 2. Place your hands in front of you as if they were holding a ball. 3. Ask the angels to work with you. 4. Focus on seeing the quality that you wish to send filling the ball you are holding. As you do so, hum softly and imagine a colour expanding the ball. 5. When your humming ball is vibrating with the qualities and love you wish to offer, picture the person to whom you are projecting it, and imagine them receiving it. (You can also mentally throw humming balls to places, situations or people you have never met.) 6. Close down by touching each chakra in turn, and placing a cross or other symbol of protection that is meaningful to you, over them.”