Margaret Drabble Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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