Time & Perspective Quote by Jilly Cooper

Cooper’s line is grief dressed up as chit-chat: a conversational “simply” that tries to make an emergency feel like common sense. The sentence pushes forward on momentum (“go on and on”), as if repetition could outpace catastrophe. It’s not the lofty, commemorative language of loss; it’s the busy, domestic register of someone who knows exactly how easy it is to delay tenderness until it’s too late.

The intent is plain but not simplistic: she’s urging a practice, not a feeling. “Tell them” turns love into something performed aloud, deliberately, even awkwardly. That matters because the subtext is less “love your people” than “stop assuming time is guaranteed.” Cooper’s cultural territory has always been relationships under pressure - social performance, messy intimacy, the everyday stakes of who calls whom back. Here she weaponizes that familiarity: affection isn’t a grand gesture, it’s a habit you either maintain or lose.

The tag question, “do you?”, does sly work. It pulls the listener into complicity and denies them the comfort of distance. You can’t disagree without sounding foolish; you can only admit the shared delusion that tomorrow is owed. In late-20th-century Britain, where stoicism and understatement are often praised as manners, the line reads like a gentle revolt: say it out loud, even if it feels embarrassing. The urgency isn’t melodramatic. It’s practical.