Margaret Forster > Quotes

“I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.”
― Margaret Forster, The Memory Box

“She smiled slightly as she continued to gaze at the passing scene: she was being a snob and delighting in it.”
― Margaret Forster, Lady's Maid

“Her mind raced with millions of violent and spectacular thoughts and ideas and in the centre of herself, she stored a passion which might terrify people if they suspected it.”
― Margaret Forster, Keeping the World Away

“Locked up inside her was an uncomfortable amount of unhappiness, perhaps even horror, if of a sadly conventional kind, and the only way she could deal with it was by pretending it never existed - so much pretending women like my grandmother had to do. The urge in her to be respectable and above reproach was so strong, and the rules of that respectability so rigid, that it overrode all other desires.”
― Margaret Forster, Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir

“council stretched either side of the road leading west to”
― Margaret Forster, My Life in Houses

“All of us, all three representatives of different generations, always have put family first but in my case, in the case of my generation, it has not been at ruinous cost. I'm not, and haven't been, crippled by the family. I don't pay an enormous emotional price for the having of one. I have been able to be myself within its confines.”
― Margaret Forster, Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir

“Everything, for a woman, is better now, even if it still not as good as it could be. To forget or deny that is an insult to the women who have gone before, women like my grandmother and mother.”
― Margaret Forster, Hidden Lives: a Family Memoir