Margaret Drabble > Quotes

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

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible.”
― 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

“Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...”
― Margaret Drabble, Sense and Sensibility

“Lucky in work, unlucky in love.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction”
― Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden

“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, The Millstone

“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, The Needle's Eye

“Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws

“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

“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

“Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate.”
― Margaret Drabble

“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

“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, The Radiant Way

“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable... Why prove that it had ever once been green?”
― Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold

“Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and they can kill their hosts. Disappointment is a deadly companion. We didn't yet know how many of us would end up in its grip, because we were all still striving, and some of us thought we were thriving.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby

“Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one's former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light?”
― Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall

“We cannot unweave, and remake. For chance and choice happen. They coincide, they coalesce, they mix, and then their joint outcome grows as hard and as fixed as cement. Like a fossil in stone, it hardens, in its own indissoluble, immutable shape.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Sea Lady

“I did not realize the dreadful facts of life. I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“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, The Peppered Moth

“His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked several times during the course of the film that the heroine looked like she ought to be playing the horse. The comment had some truth in it, in that the heroine did have an equine cast of feature, but he made it too often, and with too little variation; however, she was willing to forgive him, in view of his evident tolerance of her social errors, such as an inability to say whether or not she wanted an ice cream.”
― Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden

“[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

“I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“La notte e vicina per me. Those were the words that an elderly Italian woman, an old crone who swept the stairs, had uttered to Fran when she was working as an au pair girl in Florence, a hundred years ago.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“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, Jerusalem the Golden