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The plump and foolish quail . . . Badgered Moon. More memorable, perhaps, than her poems were her occasional comments on life and thumbnail descriptions. Condemning the modern age, she remarked: "We have to pay these enormous taxes to send mice up to badger the moon." D. H. Lawrence, she said, "had a rather matted, dark appearance as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave." On a Hollywood visit, she met and liked Marilyn Monroe, who "wasn't nearly as sexy as men like to imagine. She was a sad, sad. lonely girl. She would have made a wonderful Ophelia."
Indirectly, Dame Edith also contributed a thumbnail sketch of herself in her book, English Eccentrics, in which she attributed her subjects' (and perhaps her own) eccentricity to "that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation."