Margaret Drabble Quotes
How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.
Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.
The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
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.
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.
What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
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
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
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 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.
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.
Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.