“It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed over British Rail sandwich?”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“I like you very much. Just as you are.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.
The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature — with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin Dennis Healey eyebrows face a graveyard of dead skin cells spots erupting long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses flabby body flobbering around. Ugh ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence?”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Why, when people are leaving their partners because they're having an affair with someone else, do they think it will seem better to pretend there is no one else involved? Do they think it will be less hurtful for their partners to think they just walked out because they couldn't stand them any more and then had the good fortune to meet some tall Omar Sharif-figure with a gentleman's handbag two weeks afterwards while the ex-partner is spending his evenings bursting into tears at the sight of the toothbrush mug? It's like those people who invent a lie as an excuse rather than the truth, even when the truth is better than the lie.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“But if you are single the last thing you want is your best friend forming a functional relationship with somebody else.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Resolution number one: Obviously will lose twenty pounds. Number two: Always put last night's panties in the laundry basket. Equally important, will find sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobic's, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Thank you, Daniel, that is very good to know. But if staying here means working within 10 yards of you, frankly, I'd rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein's arse.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Don't say 'what,' say 'pardon,' darling, and do as your mother tells you.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“I'm no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“When someone loves you it's like having a blanket all round your heart...”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Oh God, what's wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out?”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?
Oh God. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still have sex?”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?"
Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“I realize it has become too easy to find a diet to fit in with whatever you happen to feel like eating and that diets are not there to be picked and mixed but picked and stuck to, which is exactly what I shall begin to do once I've eaten this chocolate croissant.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“One must not live one's life through men but must be complete on oneself as a woman of substance.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“I looked at him nonplussed. I realized that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional ideal is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“..we were always taught, instead of waiting to be swept off our feet, to 'expect little, forgive much'.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Valentine's Day purely commercial, cynical enterprise, anyway. Matter of supreme indifference to me.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
“Oh God. valentine's Day tomorrow. Why? Why? Why is (the) entire world geared to make people not involved in romance feel stupid when everyone knows romance does not work anyway. Look at (the) royal family. Look at Mum and Dad.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones's Diary
Helen Fielding
Born place: in Morley, West Yorkshire, England, The United Kingdom
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“I’m not a fucking thinker, wisher, dancer, or whiner. I’m a fucking doer. Can’t expect God to do it all now, can we? The man’s got plenty to do already, I’m just doing my part and cleaning up my side of the room.”
― Lucian Bane, quote from Mercy
“Is there any good news?' Tesla said.
Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?”
― Clive Barker, quote from The Great and Secret Show
“Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou sage
Forte et puissante, riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultrene se fera
***
Long as I live, my heart will never vary
For no one else, however fair or good
Brave, resolute, or rich, of gentle blood
My choice is made, and I will have no other.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it.”
― Patricia Briggs, quote from River Marked
“They had shared much of their pasts, most of their fears, and all of their tenuous and fragile hopes, but Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art, or something on which she was working, a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness. Because it was a subtle emotion in a world of erratic oscillations of feeling, of violence, and of lies told by every sense of perception, Deborah had not noticed it in their sick times. But one day the world had cleared enough so that she realised that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back. In their new eagerness for experience and reality, the strange aloofness stood out clearly.
[...]
She had a dream.
In the dream it was winter and night. The sky was thick blue-black and the stars were frozen in it, so that they glimmered. Over the clean white and windswept hills the shadows of snowdrifts drew long. She was walking on the crust of snow, watching the star-glimmer and the snow-glimmer and the cold tear-glimmer in her own eyes. A deep voice said to her, "You know, don't you, that the stars are sound as well as light?"
She listened and heard a lullaby made by the voices of the stars, sounding so beautiful together that she began to cry with it.
The voice said, "Look out there."
She looked toward the horizon. "See, it is a sweep, a curve." Then the voice said, "This night is a curve of darkness and the space beyond it is a curve of human history, with every single life an arch from birth to death. The apex of all of these single curves determines the curve of history and, at last, of man."
"I cannot show you yours," the voice said, "but I can show you Carla's. Dig here, deep in the snow. It is buried and frozen - Dig deep."
Deborah pushed the snow aside with her hands. It was very cold, but she worked with a great intensity as if there were salvation in it. At last her hand struck something and she tore it up from burial. It was a piece of bone, thick and very strong and curved in a long, high, steady curve.
"Is this Carla's life?" she asked. "Her creativity?"
"It is bone-deep with her, though buried and frozen." The voice paused a moment and then said, "It's a fine one - a fine solid one!"
[...]
"Please don't be angry," she said, and then told Carla the dream.
[...]
She wiped her eyes. "It was only a dream, your dream..."
"It's true anyway," Deborah said.
"The one place I could never go..." Carla said musing, "...the one hunger I could never admit."
When Deborah finished, Furii said, "You always took your art for granted, didn't you? I used to read in the ward reports all the time how you managed to do your drawing in spite of every sort of inconvenience and restriction.”
― quote from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Breaking Rules
Rising Strong
The Great Zoo of Chi...
Still Life with Brea...
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