Quotes by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble

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.

Body

Guilt

Nice

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.

Home

Memories

Mother

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.

Deception

Journey

May

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

Choices

Family

Female

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Life Is

Unjust

Vices

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.

Alive

Banking

Garden

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

Book

People

Teaching

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

Infant

Lord

Terror

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.

Children

Details

Facts

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.

Forever

Men

Trying

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Abandoned

Alive

Banking

Bears

Birth

Body

Book

Can't Win

Children

Choices

Class

Conform

Deception

Desire

Details

Facts

Failing

Family

Fate

Female

Forever

Garden

Guilt

Home

Imagination

Imagine

Impossible Things

Infant

Jobs

Journey

Kind

Life Is

Lord

May

Memories

Men

Mind

Misery

Mother

Nice

Novelists

Past

People

Positive

Reality

Scenery

Simple

Stimulants

Stories

Succeed

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Quotes by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble

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.

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.

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

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

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

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

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.

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Topics by Margaret Drabble

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