Fay Weldon

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

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.

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

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

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Worry less about what other people think about you and more about what you think about them.

I am an ordinary person but carried to extremes.

If you put a woman in a man's position she will be more efficient but no more kind.

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face the friends the health and the children you have earned.

There was no such thing as defeat if you didn't accept it.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth left to itself it sweeps in like the tide.

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.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.

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