Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd DBE FRSL, is an English novelist, biographer, and critic...
english-novelist misery pleasure rare seen
The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.
family choices female
Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.
country mean tired
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
children past years
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 forever trying
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.
tired london
London, how could one ever be tired of it?
mother winning cant-win
On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.
children school flying
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.
teaching book people
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
travel discovery people
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.
desire facts conform
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
thinking accomplishment sometimes
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.