Top 80 Fay Weldon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.”

— Fay Weldon

2. “Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”

— Fay Weldon

3. “Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application – practice. What you practice is what you manifest.”

— Fay Weldon

4. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

5. “People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.”

— Fay Weldon

6. “The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.”

— Fay Weldon

7. “Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.”

— Fay Weldon

8. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

9. “Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.”

— Fay Weldon

10. “Marriage is a very difficult relationship for nearly everyone and I’m sure you shouldn’t do it if you want a quiet little easy life.”

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon

12. “Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.”

— Fay Weldon

13. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

14. “I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.”

— Fay Weldon

15. “How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?”

— Fay Weldon

16. “I didn’t even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.”

— Fay Weldon

17. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

18. “Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.”

— Fay Weldon

19. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

20. “Women have always tried to make themselves attractive to men, and you’re not going to change a thing like that in a hurry. Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly as often as not. They get away with everything, men. They can do every disgusting thing they like and no one ever says a thing.”

— Fay Weldon

21. “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

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

— Fay Weldon

23. “Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good.”

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon

25. “Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.”

— Fay Weldon

26. “Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.”

— Fay Weldon

27. “We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.”

— Fay Weldon

28. “People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever.”

— Fay Weldon

29. “A woman has all too much substance in a man’s eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.”

— Fay Weldon

30. “The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.”

— Fay Weldon

31. “What makes women happy? Nothing, for more than ten minutes at a time, so stop worrying.”

— Fay Weldon

32. “So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you’ve been loved. That’s all you’ve got.”

— Fay Weldon

33. “There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don’t ill-treat them.”

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon

35. “You will find that women who are pregnant often don’t want to be and women who aren’t desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people.”

— Fay Weldon

36. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon

38. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

39. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

40. “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

41. “I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.”

— Fay Weldon

42. “Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.”

— Fay Weldon

43. “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.”

— Fay Weldon

44. “If you put a woman in a man’s position, she will be more efficient, but no more kind.”

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon

47. “Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.”

— Fay Weldon

48. “Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.”

— Fay Weldon

49. “I was always furious because you couldn’t take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o’clock. The library didn’t shut till half past, but you couldn’t change the books till the next day.”

— Fay Weldon

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

— Fay Weldon