Diana Cooper

"You have never, I think, known real Grief — panic, melancholia, madness, night-sweats, weve all known for most of our lives — you and me particularly. Im 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 cant 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 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."

"It has always been my temptation to put myself in other peoples shoes: even into a horses shoes as he strains before the heavy dray; into a ballerinas points as she feels age weigh upon her spring; into Cinderellas slippers as she danced till midnight; into the jackboot that kicks; into the Tommys boots that tramp; into the magic seven-leaguers. With experience of age I have learned to control this habit of sympathy which deforms truth."

"Did my mother know … Of course she did — and she didnt mind a bit. They had an incredibly happy marriage, but my father wasnt faithful to her for a single second. There was scarcely a trace of jealousy in her character. She worshipped the ground he walked on, but she wasnt very highly sexed — she was quite glad that other women were taking the weight off her, as it were. I once asked her if she minded. She said: "They were the flowers, but I was the tree."

"You find something agreeable in almost everyone. I am put off by anything not wholly agreeable."