Margaret Drabble Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Margaret Drabble
Perhaps I could take a religion that denied free will, that placed God in his true place, arbitrary, carelessly kind, idly malicious, intermittently attentive, and himself subject as Zeus was, to necessity. Necessity is my God.

Margaret Drabble
He looked like a piece of plot, standing there. An extra character, about to return to his mislaid car and his own life.

Margaret Drabble
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.

Margaret Drabble
Human contact seemed to her so frail a thing that the hope that two people might want each other in the same way, at the same time and with the possibility of doing something about it, seemed infinitely remote.

Margaret Drabble
Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable.... Why prove that it had ever once been green?

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

Margaret Drabble
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
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
Love, for both of them, had ceased to be a journey, an adventure, an essay of hope. It had become an infection, a ritual, a drama with a bloody last act, and they could both foresee the final carnage.

Margaret Drabble
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
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
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.

Margaret Drabble
People like blowing things up these days, thought Len. They prefer blowing up to building.

Margaret Drabble
You learn to put your emotional luggage where it will do some good, instead of using it to shit on other people, or blow up aeroplanes.

Margaret Drabble
Affluence was, quite simply, a question of texture... The threadbare carpets of infancy, the coconut matting, the ill-laid linoleum, the utility furniture... had all spoken of a life too near the bones of subsistence, too little padded, too severely worn.

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

Margaret Drabble
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom.

Margaret Drabble
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
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.

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

Margaret Drabble
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
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.

Margaret Drabble
Faces, they have, those suburban people, faces and identity, despite their mortgages and their alarms: and there are few emotions more ignoble, more contemptible, than the terror that seizes such as myself when we drive, quickly, past their net curtained windows.

Margaret Drabble
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.

Margaret Drabble