Quotes by Margaret Drabble - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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Nothing fails like failure
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Failure
Failing
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Nothing fails like failure.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Fails
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Scenery can be a violent stimulant.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Scenery
Stimulants
Violent
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London, how could one ever be tired of it?
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
London
Tired
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When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Positive
Impossible Things
Witty
Nothing
Sure
Possible
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Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Efficient
Flexible
People
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On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Can't Win
Mother
Winning
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Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Conform
Desire
Facts
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The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Bears
Gloom
Human Mind
Mind
Plenty
Reality
Bear
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Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Infant
Lord
Terror
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Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Failure
Failing
Succeed
Certainly
Fails
Succeeds
They Say
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If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Book
Bothered
Writing
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The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Book
Monsters
People
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The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Misery
Pleasure
Rare
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Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Wisdom
Misery
Simple
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What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Class
People
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I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Book
People
Teaching
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Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Accomplishment
Sometimes
Thinking
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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 / Novelist
Dying
Ends
Tradition
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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 / Novelist
Needs
Print
Trying
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Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Abandoned
Birth
Fate
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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 / Novelist
Life Is
Unjust
Vices
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Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Poor
Poverty
Scales
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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 / Novelist
Imagination
Imagine
Kind
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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 / Novelist
Laptops
Machines
Temptation
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Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Family
Approved
Choices
Dangerous
Family Life
Female
Sanctuary
Traditional
Itself
Dangerous Place
Perpetually
Safest
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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 / Novelist
Positive
Morning
Baby
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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 / Novelist
Discovery
Play
Would Be
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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 / Novelist
Children
Past
Years
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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 / Novelist
Country
Mean
Tired
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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 / Novelist
Men
Forever
Trying
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Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Novelists
Stories
Views
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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 / Novelist
Admirer
Enough
Too Much
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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 / Novelist
Expectations
Needs
People
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I used to be a reasonably careless and adventurous person before I had children; now I am morbidly obsessed by seat-belts and constantly afraid that low-flying aircraft will drop on my children's school.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Children
Flying
School
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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 / Novelist
Body
Flesh
Guilt
Moral
Nice
Oneself
Rid
Seem
Serve
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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 / Novelist
Jobs
War
Teaching
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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 / Novelist
Journey
Deception
May
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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 / Novelist
Done
Iraq
United States
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There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Travel
Discovery
People
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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 / Novelist
Book
Finals
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Alive
Banking
Garden
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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. ... By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.
Margaret Drabble / Novelist
Children
Details
Facts
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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 / Novelist
Home
Memories
Mother
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