Quotes by Fay Weldon

“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens”

“Men are irrelevant.”

“Theres no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”

“Reliable office staff come in the shape of mature married women working from 9.30 to 3.30 (inside school hours) during which they will do more than the 9-5ers.”

“Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.”

“The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesnt bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they dont like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesnt suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.”

“We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.”

“No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction”

So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights youve been loved. Thats all youve got.

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.

Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I dont do badly, I dont do well, I just do it.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth left to itself it sweeps in like the tide.