#chalcot crescent

[fiction-quotes]

“Why do you think we have wars? Who benefits? Not the people, that's for sure. Not the peasants, the workforce, the poor: no, it's bombs and starvation for them. They don't have money, they can't be robbed, blood-sucked, they might as well die. Bomb a city and at least someone can make money seeing that it's put up again.”

  —  Chalcot Crescent (Fay Weldon)

[fiction-quotes]

I am always concerned when people, finding out that I am a writer, apologize and say, “I'm not much a reader actually. I know I ought but I just don't seem able to find the time” and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn't mean to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don't like it, just throw it away. Or take it round to a charity shop. It's like going to a party: some people you linger with, knowing you get on. Some people you exchange greetings with and move on fast. It's nothing against them. They're just not your kind of person. It's the same with books. You must be prepared to discard. And though you may feel it's a waste of money not reading a book you don't get on with, that's like not opening the windows when the weather turns warm for fear of wasting the central heating. So, as I say, now is a good point to abandon the book. You have my permission – even my encouragement.

  —  Chalcot Crescent (Fay Weldon)

[fiction-quotes]

When people complain that I am cynical, I say, but I am not cynical, I am just old, I know what is going to happen next. That is what experience does for you.

  —  Chalcot Crescent (Fay Weldon)

[fiction-quotes]

Economists presuppose a population ruled by the rational self-interest of individuals, but alas, it is not the case. Societies are no different from the individuals that compose them, and are as likely to be ruled by Thanatos as Eros, to be periodically seized by the urge to self-destruct; just as the sun is given to a plague of sunspots from time to time for no apparent reason.

  —  Chalcot Crescent (Fay Weldon)

[fiction-quotes]

It was part of the culture at the time that any minor sexual peccadillo on either side of a partnership would be overlooked. The drugs of the day were no always as strong as they are now, but usually enough to make anyone dizzy. Karl and I were both in analysis, and understood only too well the concept of acting out – of performing an action to express, often subconsciously, one's emotional conflicts – the results of such action all too often being antisocial or self-destructive. Everything we did was under each other's, and our analysts', scrutiny, and just as we delivered dreams to fit the analyst's convenience, we would deliver our actions likewise, to fit the script the analysts were writing of our lives. We understood this in each other – or I had supposed we did.

  —  Chalcot Crescent (Fay Weldon)

[fiction-quotes]

The agents of corruption at the door can take it all. I didn't really need it, didn't really want it. It was just something to do. Really I have lost interest. Possessions are for the middle aged, not for the old. What I love is the life I lived here once. It is part of me, they can't take that away from me. The house has been here nearly two hundred years. I have been been part of it for some fifty of these. We are hermit crabs, we wait until we find one empty and then we crawl into it, shelter under its roof, and presently scuttle off somewhere new. I know oddly little about the people who lived here before me: why should those who live here in future think of me?

I say none of this to Amos. He believes like all his generation that he was born in the year zero and history started with him.

  —  Chalcot Crescent (Fay Weldon)

[lovepeaceandwolves]

Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, Londen, UK

[lovepeaceandwolves]

Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, Londen, UK