Michelle Cooper Quotes

For are any of us non-believers at moments of despair?

The way she told it, the English counties are littered with aging spinsters who accidentally displayed a spark of intelligence at a debutante dance and were banished forever from civilized society

When I asked her what she'd thought of Pride and Prejudice, she only wondered aloud how anyone could have written a novel set in the first part of the nineteenth century without once mentioning Napoleon.

When I was little, I longed and longed to be older, except now I can't recall what exactly it was that I most keenly anticipated. Being allowed to stay up as late as I wanted? To wear or eat or read whatever I pleased? Well, I could do all those things now, but mostly I don't
either because I have to get up early for work the next morning, or haven't enough money to buy the outfit I really love, or for some other boring, grown-up reason. Also, children don't realize what a huge proportion of adult life is used up worrying about things
from what to make for dinner and whether one's sheets will get dry in time to make the beds that night, to whether one will ever manage to meet the right man and marry him. Shouldn't being a grown-up be slightly more exhilarating?

She seemed to think reading was some sort of hobby, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping, and eating.

Do you know what it is?' [Toby] said thoughtfully. 'It's that they haven't had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.'
It was certainly an interesting theory, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library.

If all women were as frail as men seem to believe, the human race would have died out millennia ago.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons Toby dislikes politics-that some of the people who car most about politics seem to have the least compassion for ordinary human beings.

Sometimes I think Life is best summed up as
(a) Awful Bits
and
)b) This That Successfully Distract One from the Awful Bits

Are any of us non-believers in moments of despair?

And I'll gaze across the chasm to the other side of the island, where I can still sometimes catch sight of a curly-haired urchin running joyously through the tall purple grass, her faithful dog at her heels.

I wondered whether mad people would be better off if their memories could be neatened up, or taken off the shelves on which they were stored and replaced with nicer ones, and if they'd be the same person then, or completely different ones, and whether dreams were like a vandal rampaging through a library of memories, tearing out random pages and turning them into paper boats ...

Simon called you 'Machiavelli disguised as a debutante.'" "Gosh," I said, not sure whether to feel flattered or insulted.