Margaret Drabble quotes

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)

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

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

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

Margaret Drabble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

Margaret Drabble

Nothing fails like failure.

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

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 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

‘In my business,' she said, ‘I don't think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.'

Margaret Drabble