Best 44 quotes of Margaret Drabble on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

London, how could one ever be tired of it?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

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.

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.

Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents had on their shelves a copy of Brewer's 'Dictionary of Phase and fable', a book which, as a teenager, she would morbidly browse for hours. One of her favourite sections was 'Dying Sayings', with its fine mix of the pious, the complacent, the apocryphal, the bathetic and the defiant. Artists had fared well: Beethoven was alleged to have said 'I shall hear in heaven'; the erotic painter Etty had declared 'Wonderful! Wonderful this death!'; and Keats had died bravely, generously comforting his poor friend Severn. Those about to be executed had clearly had time to prepare a fine last thought, and of these she favoured the romantic Walter Raleigh's, 'It matters little how the head lies, so the heart be right'. Harriet Martineau, who had suffered so much as a child from religion, as Fran had later discovered, had stoically remarked, 'I see no reason why the existence of Harriet Martineau should be perpetuated', an admirably composed sentiment which had caught the child Fran's attention long before she knew who Harriet Martineau was. But most of all she had liked the parting of Siward the Dane who had commended his men: 'Lift me up that I may die standing, not lying down like a cow'.

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.

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.

(...) there's a difference between what happens to one in real life and what one can make real in art.

We cannot unweave, and remake. For chance and choice happen. They coincide, they coalesce, they mix, and then their joint outcome grows as hard and as fixed as cement. Like a fossil in stone, it hardens, in its own indissoluble, immutable shape.