Margaret Drabble Quotes

Quotes about:

• When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

  Margaret Drabble

  Positive, Witty, Impossible Things

  54 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Expectations, Needs

  Margaret Drabble (2013). “The Middle Ground”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, Finals

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Imagination, Kind, Imagine

  7 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Desire, Facts, Conform

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Garden, Banking, Alive

  The Guardian, January 2, 1993.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Forever, Trying

  Margaret Drabble (2013). “The Middle Ground”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Succeed, Failing

  Margaret Drabble (2014). “The Millstone”, p.5, Canongate Books

  5 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Family, Choices, Female

  "The Limits of Mother Love". The New York Times Book Review, www.nytimes.com. March 31, 1985.

  11 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Thinking, Accomplishment, Sometimes

  A Summer Birdcage ch. 1 (1963)

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Tired, Mean

  1989 A Natural Curiosity.

  6 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Mother, Winning, Can't Win

  Margaret Drabble (2013). “The Middle Ground”, p.68, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Wisdom, Simple, Misery

  1963 A Summer Birdcage, ch.7.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Iraq, United States, Done

  "I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world" by Margaret Drabble, www.telegraph.co.uk. May 8, 2003.

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Vices, Unjust, Life Is

  Margaret Drabble (2013). “A Summer Bird-Cage”, p.16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Reality, Mind, Bears

  9 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Lord, Terror, Infant

  The Millstone (1965)

  10 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Book, Teaching, People

  Margaret Drabble (2013). “A Summer Bird-Cage”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Book, Writing, Bothered

  5 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Fate, Birth, Abandoned

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Temptation, Machines, Laptops

  4 Copy quote

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

  Margaret Drabble

  Book, People, Monsters

  Interview with Lydia Perović, www.believermag.com.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Trying, Needs, Print

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, War, Teaching

  Interview with Lydia Perović, www.believermag.com.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Nice, Guilt, Body

  Margaret Drabble (2013). “A Summer Bird-Cage”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  53 Copy quote

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