Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Maybe the human species has evolved too far, maybe we all move around too much, too pointlessly, and consciousness will implode upon itself.

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.

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.

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.

The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.

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

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.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality, but not too much unintermit-tent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nothing fails like failure

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

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