Helen Fielding Famous Quotes
Reading Helen Fielding quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Helen Fielding. Righ click to see or save pictures of Helen Fielding quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
One has to be in control, otherwise the whole dynamic becomes a total disaster.
It is horrid to smirk.
Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.
We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter-writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?'
'Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not "rather like Jane Austen's day".
If you ask where a relationship is going too often the question has a habit of turning into where the relationship went. Unfortunately, however, God has given women an inbuilt irresistible urge to insist on knowing where their relationships are going, and to force their partners to discuss the matter at length whenever they are late for something.
I like you very much. Just as you are. Mark Darcy, Bridget Jones
Am going to cook shepherd's pie for them all - British home cooking.
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?
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
All got really plastered after that. Was completely fantastic evening. As Tom said, if Miss Havisham had had some jolly flatmates to take the piss out of her she would never have stayed so long in her wedding dress.
Do you know one of the things I love most about you, Bridget?'
'What?' I said excitedly, thinking I was about yo be praised: for being intelligent or pretty.
'That in all the time I've known you I've never once been bored by you.
One minute you're closer to someone than anyone in the whole world, next minute they need only to say the words 'time apart', 'serious talk' or 'maybe you ... ' and you're never going to see them again and will have to spend the next six months having imaginary conversations in which they beg to come back, and bursting into tears at the sight of their toothbrush.
It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more.
You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.
Apparently the book says that at certain times in your life everything goes wrong and you don't know which way to turn and it is as if everywhere around you stainless steel doors are clamping shut like in Star Trek. What you have to do is be a heroine and stay brave, without sinking into drink or self-pity and everything will be OK. And that all the Greek myths and many successful movies are all about human beings facing difficult trials and not being wimps but holding hard and thus coming out on top. The
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.
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.
I made my excuses and left, thinking, really, after a certain age, people are just going to do what they're going to do and you're either going to accept them as they are or you're not.
The world you're about to enter will be a different sea, with so much to do with how many likes you get on Facebook or who knows what ; where everyone is showing off rather than sharing their sadnesses and fears and what they really feel;
It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.
We cannot avoid pain, we cannot avoid loss. Contentment comes from the ease and flexibility with which we move through change.
Our culture is too obsessed with outward appearance, age and status. Love is what matters.
I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.
Jude: Just as you are? Not thinner? Not cleverer? Not with slightly bigger breasts or slightly smaller nose?
Bridget: No.
Shazzer: Well, fuck me.
Tom: This is someone you hate right?
Bridget: Yes, yes, I hate him.
Barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3.
I explained my whole theory about parenting being better if it was like a large Italian family having dinner under a tree while children play. Rebecca poured more wine and explained her theory of child-rearing, which is that you should behave as badly as possible so that the children will rebel against you and turn out like Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous.
Maybe will go to yoga and become more flexible. Or maybe will go out with friends and get plastered.
Is it just me or is Sunday a bizarre night for a first date? All wrong, like Saturday morning or Monday at 2 p.m.
I hadn't been there ten minutes before there were three turds on the carpet.
Singletons should not have to explain themselves all the time but should have an
accepted status - like geisha girls do
Decided to have a cappuccino and chocolate croissants on way to work to cheer self up. Do not care about figure. Is no point as no one loves or cares about me.
Just ... in ... a meeting! How could I be in a meeting, and yet talking on the phone saying I'm in a meeting? People's assistants are meant to say they're in a meeting, not the person themself, who is supposed to be unable to say anything because they're in the meeting.
If we can't have comedy books written about aspects of womanhood without going into a panic attack about it, then we haven't got very far at being equal.
9p.m. My flat. Feel very strange and empty. Is all very well thinking everything is going to be different when you come back but then it is all the same. Suppose I have to make it different. But what am I going to do with my life?
I know. Will eat some cheese.
I will not be defeated by a bad man and an American stick insect ... instead I choose Chaka Khan ... and vodka ... Bridget Jones
I sat, head down, quivering furiously at their inferences of female sell-by dates and life as game of musical chairs where girls without a chair/man when the music stops/they pass thirty are 'out.'
Huh. As if.
Girls are so much nicer than men (apart from Tom-but homosexual).
It was technological and black and thin and therefore Evil, but ... it was also a book.
What about you, this week? First you completely ignore me like some Hitler Youth ice-maiden, then you turn into an irresistible sex kitten, looking at me over the computer with not so much 'come-to-bed' as just 'come' eyes, and now suddenly you're Jeremy Paxman." We
However, on glimpsing in shop window realized outfit insane. Now am on bus, remember also that corset-ike nature of dress is torture when sitting down. One's rolls of fat are squezzed together like dough being kneaded in a food processor.
But if you are single the last thing you want is your best friend forming a functional relationship with somebody else.
So,' bellowed Cosmo, pouring me a drink. 'How's your love-life?'
Oh no. Why do they do this? Why? Maybe the Smug Marrieds only mix with other Smug Marrieds and don't know how to relate to individuals any more. Maybe they really do want to patronize us and make us feel like failed human beings. Or maybe they are in such a sexual rut they're thinking, 'There's a whole other world out there,' and hoping for vicarious thrills by getting us to tell them the roller-coaster details of our sex lives.
It's a bit like if we were on a planet where all the space creatures were short, green and fat. Except a very few of them were tall, thin and yellow. And all the advertising was of the tall, yellow ones, airbrushed to make them even taller and yellower. So all the little green space creatures spent their whole time feeling sad because they weren't tall, thin and yellow.
I know we're all psychotic, single and completely dysfunctional and it's all done over the phone,' Tom slurred sentimentally, 'but it's a bit like a family, isn't it?
That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.
I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.
The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.
Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone
exhausting themselves, miserably hemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no
longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. (Hmm. Though must admit, pretty bloody pleased to have new handbag.) What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six
weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then
fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout?
Weightless (in air), alcohol units 8 (but in-flight so canceled out by altitude), cigarettes 0 (desperate: no-smoking seat), calories 1 million (entirely made up of things would never have dreamt of putting in self's mouth were they not on in-flight tray), farts from traveling companion 38 (so far), variations in fart aroma 0.
Is the whole world doomed to emotional trauma?
Nobody wants to be racist and I think that most people aren't.
The point is you are supposed to vote for the principle of the thing, not the itsy-bitsy detail about this percent and that percent.
But the thing about having kids is: you can't go to pieces; you just have to keep going.
I come from Yorkshire in England where we like to eat chip sandwiches - white bread, butter, tomato ketchup and big fat french fries cooked in beef dripping.
Keep thinking back about what Mum said about being real and the Velveteen Rabbit book (though frankly have had enough trouble with rabbits in this particular house). My favorite book, she claims of which I have no memory was about how little kids get one toy that they love more than all the others, and even when its fur has been rubbed off, and it's gone saggy with bits missing, the little child still thinks it's the most beautiful toy in the world, and can't bear to be parted from it.
That's how it works, when people really love each other, Mum whispered on the way out in the Debenhams lift, as if she was confessing some hideous and embarrassing secret. But, the thing is, darling, it doesn't happen to ones who have sharp edges, or break if they get dropped, or ones made of silly synthetic stuff that doesn't last. You have to be brave and let the other person know who you are and what you feel.
It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.
As Oscar Wilde says, thirty-five is the perfect age for a woman, so much so that many women have decided to adopt it for the rest of their lives.
The plans to lose weight and change personality kept me aloft for two days, only to collapse around my ears. I realize it was only a complicated form of
denial.
Valentine's Day purely commercial, cynical enterprise, anyway. Matter of supreme indifference to me.
The skin around my eyes was becoming, even as I watched, a mass of wrinkles; chin and jowls were sagging, neck like a turkey, marionette lines rushing from my mouth to my chin in manner of Angela Merkel. As I stared I could almost seamy hair turning into a tight grey perm. It had finally happened. I was an old lady.
He picked me up in his arms, as if I was as light as a feather, which I am not, unless it was a very heavy feather, maybe from a giant prehistoric dinosaur-type bird ...
Maybe there are just some men like that in the world, I thought. Men who have to be in charge, who have to punish those who awaken feelings in them which they cannot control. Men who will lure you with tenderness till you believe that you are safe then slap you down. Men whom it is impossible for anyone to love without losing their dignity. Men who have to damage those who love them most. But, then, I had fallen on love with one, so what did that make me?
When someone loves you it's like having a blanket all round your heart ...
I began to think I quite liked her really. It's always so nice to meet someone more badly behaved than oneself.
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.
Alcohol units: 5. Drowning sorrows. Cigarettes: 23. Fumigating sorrows. Calories: 3,856. Smothering sorrows in fat duvet.
Rules for Living by Olivia Joules
1. Never panic. Stop, breathe, think.
2. No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.
3. Never change haircut or color before an important event.
4. Nothing is either as bad or good as it seems.
5. Do as you would be done by, e.g. thou shalt not kill.
6. It is better to buy one expensive thing that you really like than several cheap ones that you only quite like.
7. Hardly anything matters: if you get upset, ask yourself, "Does it really matter?"
8. The key to success lies in how you pick yourself up from failure.
9. Be honest and kind.
10. Only buy clothes that make you feel like doing a small dance.
11. Trust your instincts, not your overactive imagination.
12. When overwhelmed by disaster, check if it's really a disaster by doing the following: (a) think, "Oh, fuck it," (b) look on the bright side, and if that doesn't work, look on the funny side. If neither of the above works then maybe it is a disaster so turn to items 1 and 4.
13. Don't expect the world to be safe or life to be fair.
It's all chop-change chop-change with you. Either go out with me and treat me nicely, or leave me alone. As I say, I am not interested in fuckwittage.
I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage.
I'm fed up with you," I said furiously. "I told you quite specifically the first time you tried to undo my skirt that I am not into emotional fuckwittage. It was very bad to carry on flirting, sleep with me then not even follow it up with a phone call, and try to pretend the whole thing never happened. Did you just ask me to Prague to make sure you could still sleep with me if you wanted to as if we were on some sort of ladder?" "A
Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes ...
I will not sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance,complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.
I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.
I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can't take the pressure.
Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine year old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day'. (Talitha)
When he's hot, he's hot; when he's not, he's not. But at least there is always food
Where is the tuna? Where? Where?
Bad enough when a man wanted to touch but could only look. Worse yet when he'd touched and not even noticed.
On the night bus, I felt as though parts of other people were going into parts of me I didn't even know existed. I felt like I was being more intimate with members of the night-bus community than I'd ever been with anyone in my whole life.
Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss
No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.
What a blessing to be born with such Sloaney arrogance. Perpetua could be the size of a Renault Espace and not give it a thought.
Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why?
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.
I keep telling you, nobody wants legs like a stick insect. They want a bottom they can park in a bike in and balance a pint of beer on.
I hate Christmas. Everything is designed for families, romance, warmth, emotion and presents, and if you have no boyfriend, no money, your mother is going out with a missing Portuguese criminal and your friends don't want to be your friend anymore, it makes you want to emigrate to a vicious Muslim regime, where at least all the
women are treated like social outcasts. Anyway, I don't care. I am going to quietly read a book all
weekend and listen to classical music.
The book also says that coping with difficult times is like being in a conical shell-shaped spiral and there is a point at each turn that is very painful and difficult. That is your particular problem or sore spot. When you are at the narrow, pointy end of the spiral you come back to that situation very often as the rotations are quite small. As you go round, you will go through the troubled time less and less frequently but still you must come back to it, so you shouldn't feel when it happens that you are back to square one. Trouble
I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.
Oh, darling, you can't go around with that tatty green canvas thing. You look like some sort of Mary Poppins person who's fallen on hard times.
The nation's young men have
been proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there's a whole
generation of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and
don't need to wash anyone else's socks.
Don't say 'what,' say 'pardon,' darling, and do as your mother tells you.
I like L.A. It's like a mini break. For a writer, it's hilarious. Like the food. Where I come from, we eat chip sandwiches: white bread, butter, tomato catsup and big fat french fries. It's delicious. Here, you order a creme caramel and the waiter says, 'You know, that contains dairy.'
Went to Jude's party tonight in a tight little black dress to show off figure feeling v. full of myself ...
... There's nothing worse than people telling you you looked tired. They might as well have done with it and say you look like five kinds of shit.
The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. Tom says football guru Nick Hornby says in his book that men's obsession with football is not vicarious. The testosterone-crazed fans do not wish themselves on the pitch, claims Hornby, instead seeing their team as their chosen representatives, rather like parliament. That is precisely my feeling about Darcy and Elizabeth. They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest.
HARHARBLOODY HAR. Put that in your pipe hole and smoke it, society!