Quotes from Margaret Drabble

Nothing fails like failure.

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

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

Mid-life crises, in Fran's ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.

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.

I've got selfish in my old age. I live as I like.

she too lives in and for words, for the words of others. Other men's flowers. 'These are other men's flowers, only the string that binds them is my own.

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.

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.

Do you think preservatives make you live longer, or do they kill you off, asks Fran. She has often wondered about this.

Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer?

for an incestuous friendship will outlive, as I have discovered, any passionate love.

Robots would save the elderly from the woes of the ageing flesh.

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.

She had sold their flat and moved to the east. She hadn't wanted to live in Highgate on her own. She'd wanted a new place, a new life, for what was left of life.

there's a difference between what happens to one in real life and what one can make real in art.

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 fucking idiot'.

Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work–life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It's fucked up old age itself.

She is pleased to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.

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.

For the past is not fixed: it changes as we change, and we look back and perceive in it different messages, different patterns. Our past selves speak to our future selves. We are part of a continuing process.