Margaret Drabble Quotes

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.

Nothing fails like failure.

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.

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.

Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one's former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light?

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.

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 succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

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

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

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 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.

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

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

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.

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.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

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.

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.

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.

London, how could one ever be tired of it?

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

I did not realize the dreadful facts of life. I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.