Jilly Cooper Quotes

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

In our vile English climate, rough winds shake not only the darling buds of May, but of June, July, August and September as well.

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.

So, what do you go for in a girl?” He crows, lifting a lager to his lips Gestures where his mate sits Downs his glass “He prefers tits I prefer ass. What do you go for in a girl?” I don’t feel comfortable The air left the room a long time ago All eyes are on me Well, if you must know I want a girl who reads Yeah. Reads. I’m not trying to call you a chauvinist Cos I know you’re not alone in this but… I want a girl who reads Who needs the written word & uses the added vocabulary She gleans from novels and poetry To hold lively conversation In a range of social situations I want a girl who reads Who’s heart bleeds at the words of Graham Greene Or even Heat magazine Who’ll tie back her hair while reading Jane Eyre And goes cover to cover with each water stones three for two offer but I want a girl who doesn’t stop there I want a girl who reads Who feeds her addiction for fiction With unusual poems and plays That she hunts out in crooked bookshops for days and days and days She’ll sit addicted at breakfast, soaking up the back of the cornflakes box And the information she gets from what she reads makes her a total fox Cos she’s interesting & unique & her theories make me go weak at the knees I want a girl who reads A girl who’s eyes will analyze The menu over dinner Who’ll use what she learns to kick my ass in arguments so she always ends the winner But she’ll still be sweet and she’ll still be flirty Cos she loves the classics and the classics are dirty So late at night she’d always have me in a stupor As she paraphrases the raunchier moments from the works of Jilly Cooper See, some guys prefer asses Some prefer tits And I’m not saying that I don’t like those bits But what’s more important What supersedes Is a girl with passion, wit and dreams So I’d like a girl who reads.

I'm going to get absolutely plastered tonight, darling. i love you so much, I want to see two of you.

Books saw her through the pupal stage of thirteen to sixteen, frowning at Kafka and Woolf, then tearing through John Irving and Maeve Binchy, widely read in the proper sense, making no distinction between Jilly Cooper and Edith Wharton. There were stories on film and TV and, a little later, in the rolling melodrama of the internet, but those were team activities, noisy and social. Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.

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.

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.

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.

gorped

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pardon This word is the most notorious pet hate of the upper and upper-middle classes. Jilly Cooper recalls overhearing her son telling a friend ‘Mummy says that “pardon” is a much worse word than “fuck”.’ He was quite right: to the uppers and upper-middles, using such an unmistakably lower-class term is worse than swearing. Some even refer to lower-middle-class suburbs as ‘Pardonia’. Here is a good class-test you can try: when talking to an English person, deliberately say something too quietly for them to hear you properly. A lower-middle or middle-middle person will say, ‘Pardon?’; an upper-middle will say ‘Sorry?’ (or perhaps ‘Sorry – what?’ or ‘What – sorry?’); but an upper-class and a working-class person will both just say, ‘What?’ The working-class person may drop the t – ‘Wha’?’ – but this will be the only difference. Some upper-working-class people with middle-class aspirations might say ‘pardon’, in a misguided attempt to sound ‘posh’.

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.

If Women's Lib want a crack at the positions of power, they must forfeit their position of weakness. It will be men and children in future who will be helped solicitously into the first lifeboats, and the man who sits like a stuck pig in the car while his wife leaps out in the pouring rain, opens the door for him, and spikes her eyes out as she covers him with an umbrella.

Never drink black coffee at lunch: it will keep you awake in the afternoon.

He thought of Hilary's tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands.

straw or a speck of dust anywhere.

She was a good if sloppy writer.

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.

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.

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

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].

I do so love books. I can’t think of many truer pleasures than settling into a fat armchair, letting my mouth fall open, and reading a novel. And I mean really reading one – not just skim-reading it before a live TV interview, or pretending to read Middlemarch while smiling sagely to look more attractive in a departure lounge – genuinely reading. For me, books aren’t just a feast for the eyes. I love the feel of books: the flaps of reformed pulp nestling compliantly in the crook of my hand, my fingers tracing their supple spines; I love the sound of books – I don’t mean audiobooks, I don’t like audiobooks, I’ve never liked audiobooks: If I want to hear Sam West reading Inspector Morse out loud I’ll go to one of his garden parties; no, I’ll only allow audiobooks if you’re operating heavy machinery or are just plain blind (and don’t forget they have been given braille) – I mean the sound of a book: The moth-like thrum of flicked pages, the gedoink of a thudding tome as it lands on a bedside table. But most of all, I love the stench of books; the thick odour that leaps from their pages. If I’m feeling a little low and I’m in a library, I’ve been known to open a book (just a little), slot my nose into its tempting crevice, and inhale a deep whiff of book until my eyes roll back in their sockets and I have to lie down in a section where no-one goes (such as African literature). For me, nothing beats the delight of quietly slipping my nose into the crack of a Brontë or A Few Good Men and letting the aroma tantalise my olfactory nerve endings. Oh, the smell! Oh! The! Smell! The trusty, musty, dusty, fusty, crusty, and (if it’s a Jilly Cooper) busty and lusty smell of literature!

Lucky, lucky

Tehát végül is azt hiszem, a könyv eredeti címe, a How to be a Woman kicsit félrevezető. A botladozó, rémisztő és csodálatos évek alatt végig azt hittem, hogy amit akarok, az, hogy nővé váljak. Germaine Greer, Elizabeth Taylor, E. Nesbit, Courtney Love, Jilly Cooper és Lady Gaga valamiféle mesébe illő ötvözete. Hogy valamiképpen elsajátítsam a női lét misztikus művészetét, és végül varázserejű eszményképe legyek mindazoknak a dolgoknak, amelyek már kezdettől fogva összezavartak és lesújtottak, ott, akkor, 13 évesen, wolverhamptoni ágyamban. Hercegnő. Istennő. Múzsa. De ahogy teltek az évek, rájöttem, hogy nem akarok más lenni, csak ember, és kész. Csak egy eredményes, becsületes ember, akivel mások udvariasan bánnak. Egy „a Srácok” közül. Csak épp igazán gyönyörű hajjal.

wicked, dangerously direct eyes.

mostly to stop blacks killing blacks, they’re so tribal

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

Will Repay.