Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget Jones, #1)

by Helen Fielding

How’s your love life, anyway?” Oh God. Why can’t married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask?

“How’s your marriage going? Still having sex?”

Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-all it wa...

The rich, divorced-by-cruel-wife Mark—quite tall—was

The trouble with working in publishing is that reading in your spare time is a bit like being a dustman and snuffling through the pig bin in the evening.

completely safe option as no way diamond-pattern-jumpered goody-goody would have read five-hundred-page feminist treatise.

It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth or power but the pursuit of attainable goals: and what is a diet if not that?

there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism.

“We women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love and relying on our own economic power.

In twenty years’ time men won’t even dare start with fuckwittage because we will just laugh in their faces,”

We’re going BACKWARDS

She must stop beating herself over the head with Women Who Love Too Much and instead think more toward Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which will help her to see Richard’s behavior less as a sign that she is co-dependent and loving too much and more in the light of him being like a Martian rubber band which needs to stretch away in order to come back.

Sharon and I suddenly were filled with remorse and self-loathing for not advising Jude simply to get rid of Vile Richard because he is vile. But then, as Sharon pointed out, last time we did that they got back together and she told him everything we’d said in a fit of reconciliatory confession and now it is cripplingly embarrassing every time we see him and he thinks we are the Bitch Queens from Hell—which,

calories 1258 (love has eradicated need to pig out).

Hah! Undeniably flirtatious.

Hmm. Think will cross last bit out as contains mild accusation of sexual harassment whereas v. much enjoying being sexually harassed by Daniel Cleaver.

(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.)

Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature—with

Is it any wonder girls have no confidence?

one must not live one’s life through men but must be complete in oneself as a woman of substance.

positive thoughts 0.

Apparently there is a Martin Amis character who is so crazily addicted that he starts wanting a cigarette even when he’s smoking one. That’s me.

he said in a stiff, embarrassed way as he fiddled around with the oil stick, wiping it with rags and plunging it back in a not unworrying manner, if one were a Freudian. Which I am not.

Work has become like going to a party in order to get off with someone and finding they haven’t turned up.

I love Magda and Jeremy. Sometimes I stay at their house, admiring the crisp sheets and many storage jars full of different kinds of pasta, imagining that they are my parents.

Maybe they really do want to patronize us and make us feel like failed human beings.

“Thanks for a super evening!” Then I got into a taxi and burst into tears.

there’s more than one bloody way to live: one in four households are single, most of the royal family are single, 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. We’d be as happy as larks if people like you didn’t conspire to make us feel stupid just because you’re jealous.’ ”

Part of the arrogance of youth (well, I say “youth”) is the assumption that your parents will drop whatever they are doing and welcome you with open arms the second you decide to turn up.

Daniel will be back in the office today. I shall be poised and cool and remember that I am a woman of substance and do not need men in order to be complete, especially not him.

9:36 a.m. Oh God, oh God. Maybe he’s fallen in love in New York and stayed there. 9:47 a.m. Or gone to Las Vegas and got married.

we are at the mercy of the elements, and should not concentrate so hard on being sophisticated or hardworking but on staying warm and watching the telly.

It is so long since I have done anything at all for anyone else that it is a totally new and heady sensation. This is what has been missing in my life.

I am having fantasies about becoming a Samaritan or Sunday school teacher, making soup for the homeless (or, as my friend Tom suggested, darling mini-bruschettas with pesto sauce), or even retraining as a doctor. Maybe going out with a doctor would be better still, both sexually and spiritually fulfilling.

everyone knows romance does not work anyway.

Valentine’s Day purely commercial, cynical enterprise, anyway.

That’s why it’s fun for everyone 😔

“The whole thing is ridiculous and meaningless. Complete commercial exploitation.” “I knew you didn’t get any,”

Girl fuck youuuu. She needs to call HR

Inside it said, “A piece of ridiculous and meaningless commercial exploitation—for my darling little frigid cow.”

HR?!?!?!?!

Just called Sharon and recounted whole thing to her. She said I should not allow my head to be turned by a cheap card and should lay off Daniel as he is not a very nice person and no good will come of it.

Real

I was thinking it all over and trying, as a feminist, to see Mum’s point of view.

“You’re so obsessed with sex if you saw Mum taking communion you’d think she was giving the vicar a blow job.

Relax…

Wise people will say Daniel should like me just as I am, but 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.

(at last have found the secret of not eating: simply replace food with sex).

Maybe their generation is just better at getting on with relationships? Maybe they don’t mooch about being all paranoid and diffident. Maybe it helps if you’ve never read a self-help book in your life.

Jude introduced the concept of Boy Time—as introduced in the film Clueless: namely five days (“seven,” I interjected) during which new relationship is left hanging in air after sex does not seem agonizing lifetime to males of species, but a normal cooling-down period in which to gather emotions, before proceeding.

Either go out with me and treat me nicely, or leave me alone.

It turned out Magda had booked a big table at 192 and told everyone to go there instead of my flat, and there they all were waiting with presents, planning to buy me dinner.

They locked in

I will Stop being so neurotic and dreading things.

Wish to be like Kathleen Tynan (though not, obviously, dead).

Understand where have been going wrong by going to parties armed only with objective of not getting too pissed.

Oh God. Do not want to go to scary party. Want to stay home with bottle of wine