Fay Weldon - Auto da Fay (2002)

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There seems to be a general overall pattern in most lives, that nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden everything happens.

Fay Weldon
One learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

Fay Weldon
By and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.

Fay Weldon
The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.

Fay Weldon
People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Fay Weldon
One tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity.

Fay Weldon
Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

Fay Weldon
I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulation: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

Fay Weldon
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.

Fay Weldon
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.

Fay Weldon
Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.

Fay Weldon
If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.

Fay Weldon
A woman's body works as if it knew something she didn't, and does not have her best interests at heart. If you need to look your best it will deliver you a pimple; if you don't want it to, your period will start early; if you want a baby badly your body refuses to give you one; if you are content in your life, lo, you are pregnant.

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

Fay Weldon
No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

Fay Weldon
Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Fay Weldon
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.

Fay Weldon
This is an attempt to narrate a real life, my own, and to find the pattern within it. The pattern can't really be completed, of course, until death, when autobiography so rudely turns into biography.

Fay Weldon
All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

Fay Weldon
And then of course the babies came, and took us by surprise, as babies do. First, how much you love them, second, how much work they are, third, how difficult it is to leave them. We would rather sit and sing to them than get on with running a business.

Fay Weldon
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.

Fay Weldon
Both Ron and I went to see our analysts twice a week so really there was no need to speak to each other.

Fay Weldon
Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford.

Fay Weldon
Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

Fay Weldon
Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.

Fay Weldon