Fay Weldon Quotes
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So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.
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Instinct' usually just means our conditioning to believe this or believe that, without thinking to investigate.
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No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.
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Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.
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One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.
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To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.
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My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don't want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.
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I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.
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Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.
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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?
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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.
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Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, ot waste too much energy on other peoples' woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.
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I was seduced by secrets, which are to true love as artificial sweetener is to sugar, calorie-free but in the long run carcinogenic, not the real thing, and only a peculiar aftertaste in the mouth to tell you so, to warn you.
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If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.
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Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
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Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.
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A 'weakness,' I now realize, is nothing but a strength not properly developed.
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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.
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Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.
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Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.
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I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation.
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If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.
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Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.
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Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.
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Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.
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One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most.
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memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.
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I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?
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Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.
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Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.
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