Margaret Drabble Quotations

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.

Affluence was, quite simply, a question of texture ... The threadbare carpets of infancy, the coconut matting, the ill-laid linoleum, the utility furniture ... had all spoken of a life too near the bones of subsistence, too little padded, too severely worn.

England's not a bad country? It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286

What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.

I actually remember feeling delight, at two o'clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.

Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.

I used to be a reasonably careless and adventurous person before I had children; now I am morbidly obsessed by seat-belts and constantly afraid that low-flying aircraft will drop on my children's school.

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

London, how could one ever be tired of it?

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world,

Nothing fails like failure

A man's greatest fear from a woman is that she will laugh at him; a woman's fear is that a man will kill her.

Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories - at all social levels - which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.