Quotes from Fay Weldon

It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs.

My troubles are not outside me,' said Esther, 'they are inside me. Those are the worst troubles of all.

There is nothing, she would think, more delicious that the icing of bought chocolate cake, eaten in the silence and privacy of the night.

The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffer everything.

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.

You don't go to church for intellectual gratification - you go because it pleases your aesthetic sensibilities.

If that was dying, I don't want to do it again.

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.

New lives always begin tomorrow, […] Never now.

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

Some of us are made fat and some of us are made thin, and that's all there is to it.

Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.

Every time you open your wardrobe, you look at your clothes and you wonder what you are going to wear. What you are really saying is 'Who am I going to be today?

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.

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.

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

Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.

Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman within, and there the she devil is.