Fay Weldon > Quotes

“Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.”
― Fay Weldon

“guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine”
― Fay Weldon

“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”
― Fay Weldon

“I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.”
― Fay Weldon, Chalcot Crescent

“Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.”
― Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen

“One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of
definition translate tendencies into habits.”
― Fay Weldon

“Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!”
― Fay Weldon

“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.”
― Fay Weldon, Worst Fears

“Absolutely,' she said. 'The more you pay attention to the body, the less attention you've got left to pay the soul. I really do understand that.”
― Fay Weldon, Darcy's Utopia

“Not satisfied with what he's got? Is that it? That's husbands all over. Ungrateful pigs. You do everything for them, you bring up their kids, you cook their food, you wash their clothes, you warm their beds, you fuss over your face day after day so they'll fancy you, you wear yourself out to keep them happy and at the end of it all, what happens? They find someone else they fancy more. Someone young some man hasn't had the chance to wear out yet. Marriage is a con trick. A girl should marry a rich man, then at least she'd have a fur coat to keep her warm in her old age.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“If anything happiness is a feeling of being essential”
― Fay Weldon

“To do good to one is to do bad to another. But you don't need to hear my excuses. They are the same that everyone makes to themselves when faced with the misery of others; though they would like to do the right thing, they simply fail to do so and look after themselves instead.”
― Fay Weldon

“So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.”
― Fay Weldon, Angel, all innocence, and other stories

“The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffer everything.”
― Fay Weldon

“It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs.”
― Fay Weldon

“My troubles are not outside me,' said Esther, 'they are inside me. Those are the worst troubles of all.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“There is nothing, she would think, more delicious that the icing of bought chocolate cake, eaten in the silence and privacy of the night.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”
― Fay Weldon, Down Among the Women

“Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life... in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked.”
― faye weldon

“I think it's important to go (to church every Sunday) and sit and think about something other than yourself, pray for the sick, consider the dead.”
― Fay Weldon

“If that was dying, I don't want to do it again.”
― Fay Weldon

“want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“When you're with a man, no one tells you he's a creep; they don't like to; they think, well, that's her choice, perhaps ours isn't up to much either; how will we ever be sure, in this polite world? In other words, as we all know, one woman's creep is another's true love, and just as well.”
― Faye Weldon

“Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not a green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won't. Gerry can die, and you won't. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

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

“You don't go to church for intellectual gratification - you go because it pleases your aesthetic sensibilities.”
― Fay Weldon

“New lives always begin tomorrow, […] Never now.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke