Margaret Drabble Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.
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Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
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If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
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Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
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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.
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Nothing fails like failure
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On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.
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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.
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I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
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I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.
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Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
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London, how could one ever be tired of it?
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The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Scenery can be a violent stimulant.
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What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
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Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?
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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.
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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.
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When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
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