Top 51 Margaret Drabble Quotes
#1. Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
Margaret Drabble
#2. The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
Margaret Drabble
#3. Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable ... Why prove that it had ever once been green?
Margaret Drabble
#4. I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Margaret Drabble
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. [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
#17. 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
#18. Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die ...
Margaret Drabble
#20. Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.
Margaret Drabble
#22. 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
#23. Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Margaret Drabble
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
Margaret Drabble
#31. 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
#33. The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.
Margaret Drabble
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
Margaret Drabble
#37. 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
#38. I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction
Margaret Drabble
#39. 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
#40. Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.
Margaret Drabble
#41. Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
Margaret Drabble
#42. 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
#43. On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.
Margaret Drabble
#45. 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
#46. Mid-life crises, in Fran's ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.
Margaret Drabble
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
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