Dame Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble, is an English novelist, biographer and critic. Her first novel appeared in 1963. (Margaret Drabble Quotes)
“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
“Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn’t offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn’t eat it, although they wouldn’t, but because meat doesn’t produce dripping any more. The meat isn’t real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it’s something else.”
Margaret Drabble
The Dark Flood Rises
“Do you think preservatives make you live longer, or do they kill you off, asks Fran. She has often wondered about this.”
Margaret Drabble
The Dark Flood Rises
“Here in the Black Country they call good food ‘bostin’ fittle’. Fittle means vittles. Good vittles, bostin’ fittle. They have their own language here. It hasn’t been knocked out of them yet.”
Margaret Drabble
The Dark Flood Rises
“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
“How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold forever.”
Margaret Drabble
A Summer Bird-Cage
“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
“I don’t see how you can go too far, in the right direction”
Margaret Drabble
Jerusalem the Golden
“I had the additional disadvantage of being unable to approve my own conduct; being a child of the age, I knew how wrong and how misguided it was. I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery.”
Margaret Drabble
The Millstone
“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
“I look back now with some anguish to each touch and glance, to every changing conjunction of limbs and heads and hands. I have lived it over every day for so long now that I am in danger of forgetting the true shape of how it was, because each time I go over it I wish that I had given a little more here or there, or at the very least said what was in my heart, so that he could have known how much it meant to me. But I was incapable, even when happy, of exposing myself thus far.” (Margaret Drabble Quotes)
Margaret Drabble
The Millstone
“It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies.”
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
“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
“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
The Middle
“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
“One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment”
Margaret Drabble
The Dark Flood Rises
“Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.”
Margaret Drabble
A Summer Bird-Cage
“She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be ‘You bloody old fool’ or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, ‘you idiot’.”
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
“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
“Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.”
Margaret Drabble
A Summer Bird-Cage
“The dining area of the Premier Inn is geared to dispel elderly apprehensions, not to reinforce them. It is noisy and colourful and full of large busy middle-era middle England middle-aged people talking loudly and cheerfully and eating highly coloured meals, most of them from the hot red end of the spectrum.”
Margaret Drabble
The Dark Flood Rises
“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
The Middle
“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable… Why prove that it had ever once been green?”
Margaret Drabble
The Realms of Gold
“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
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