Quotes from Fay Weldon

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 don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it.

If you love the father of your child you feel he has given enough. If you don't love him all you want is his money.

Of course men can't know you when you're unclean,' said Hilda. 'It says so in the Bible. That's why it's called the curse. It's God's punishment.' 'For what?' 'Giving Adam the apple, I suppose.' 'He didn't have to eat it.' 'Yes he did. If someone offers you food, it's only manners to take it. Why are you always so argumentative?

I am not all she devil. A she devil has no memory of the past - she is born afresh every morning. She deals with the feelings of today, not yesterday, and she is free. There is a little bit of me left, still woman.

PRAXIS DUVEEN, AT THE age of five, sitting on the beach at Brighton, made a pretty picture for the photographer. Round angel face, yellow curls, puffed sleeves, white socks and little white shoes—one on, one off, while she tried to take a pebble from between her tiny pink toes—delightful! The photographer had hoped to include her elder sister Hypatia in the picture, but that sullen, sallow little girl had refused to appear on the same piece of card as her ill-shod sister.

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.

We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the particular. The general is frightening.

I'd have apple pie. You break through the crust and it's juicy underneath.

Idle, profligate, ingrate. No one decent could ever want him.

Ruby once told Margaret that Ben was an accident, but it wasn't true. The house just felt empty without a baby in it. Good God, why do women have such feelings: and worse, having them, why do they then act upon them?

else to go Felicity sits down upon the steps to consider

As a young woman I, Frances, did not have Serena's appetite for work. I never quite accepted employment as an essential part in my life.

Guilt is to the soul as pain is to the body, a warning that harm is being done.

Serena is full of advice, about everything from how to cure thrush, how to survive a divorce, how to write novels. She feels that if she knows things others don't it is her duty to pass them on. Many of her sentences begin with 'Why don't you—?' 

A brave little woman,' said the vicar. 'So many of our women are now left alone.' And so they were. Those who in peacetime were expected to need male protection, in wartime were assumed to be able to manage perfectly well. And so they did.

Serena maintains today that as George grew older he also grew out of his mind. Many men do, in my experience. Life does not come up to their expectations: they grow older, and disappointed. At fifty they realise others have passed them by, made more money, won more respect. Their sexual drive fades and the self-esteem that goes with it. They take to litigation and shake their fists at other drivers.

He knew he had changed because when presently he took confession from a woman who had been using contraceptives and whose husband had left her, he did not equate the sin with the consequence.

Domestic strife is catching. Happy couples do well to avoid the company of the unhappy.

Doubt afflicts the good, not the bad.

Curran was beautiful but perhaps a little mad.

Her feminism is still only skin deep, an academic study. History, now fashionably related in the present tense, has deprived the past of its reality.

I need men to define me: to give me an idea of what I am. If I didn't have boyfriends I don't think I would exist. I would fly apart in all directions. So I must live my life in perpetual pain, if I want to live at all.

even as she says it, sees love drain out of his eyes: and somehow, as a stream, which seeks its own level, it flows over into hers, and her fate is sealed. The less he loves, the more she will.

You shouldn't keep other people's phallic symbols on the mantelpiece.