Margaret Drabble Quotes & Sayings

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

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 — Margaret Drabble

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

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

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. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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

Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate. — Margaret Drabble

When Hamish and I loved each other for a whole year without making love, I did not realize that I had set the mould of my whole life. One could find endless reasons for our abstinence
fear, virtue, ignorance, perversion
but the fact remains that the Hamish pattern was to be endlessly repeated, and with increasing velocity and lack of depth, so that eventually the idea of love ended in me almost the day that it began. Nothing succeeds, they say, life success, and certainly nothing fails like failure. I was successful in my work, so I suppose other successes were too much to hope for. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

When nothing is sure, everything is possible. — Margaret Drabble

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

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. — Margaret Drabble

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

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

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. — Margaret Drabble

It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember ... By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget. — Margaret Drabble

Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable ... Why prove that it had ever once been green? — Margaret Drabble

Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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

The e-reader certainly sorts out the sheep from the goats, and divides those who need to read from those who like to turn the pages. — Margaret Drabble

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, — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

She liked Christian names, she liked those who used them as a sign of easy inclusion and intimacy, but to her the use of a name remained a proclamation, an action, an event. She was not accustomed to names. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie. — Margaret Drabble

Nothing fails like failure. — Margaret Drabble

Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and they can kill their hosts. Disappointment is a deadly companion. We didn't yet know how many of us would end up in its grip, because we were all still striving, and some of us thought we were thriving. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

London, how could one ever be tired of it? — Margaret Drabble

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn't fashionable these days, but it's her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. — Margaret Drabble

Mid-life crises, in Fran's ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises. — Margaret Drabble

His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked several times during the course of the film that the heroine looked like she ought to be playing the horse. The comment had some truth in it, in that the heroine did have an equine cast of feature, but he made it too often, and with too little variation; however, she was willing to forgive him, in view of his evident tolerance of her social errors, such as an inability to say whether or not she wanted an ice cream. — Margaret Drabble

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

I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction — Margaret Drabble

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

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

Since childhood, since her early school days, New Year's Eve had possessed for her a mournful terror: she had elected it to represent the Nothingness which was her own life, the solid, cheerful festival which had seemed to be the lives of others. — Margaret Drabble

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

He talks a lot, but he talks about cars and golf and keeping fit. Fran likes trivia, but she's more interested in female trivia than male. Teresa — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

It is to be doubted whether anybody who said good-bye to Bert had any faith or interest whatsoever in the life everlasting. This life had, some of them thought, been quite bad enough. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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

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. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

Scenery can be a violent stimulant. — Margaret Drabble

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient? — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

[on John Cowper Powys] ... there is an indistinct photograph of the great man himself, gazing into the misty cleft of a mountain range, wearing what could be an old rug, or an old cardigan. He looks like a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child. — Margaret Drabble

Lucky in work, unlucky in love. — Margaret Drabble

Maybe the human species has evolved too far, maybe we all move around too much, too pointlessly, and consciousness will implode upon itself. — Margaret Drabble

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. — Margaret Drabble

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