Quotes by Margaret Drabble

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible.”

“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 a...”

“Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.”

“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...”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“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 di...”

“Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents had on their shelves a copy of Brewer's 'Dictionary of Phase and fa...”

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

“It is to be doubted whether anybody who said good-bye to Bert had any faith or interest whatsoever in the life everlasting. This life had, some of them thought, been quite bad enough.”

“When nothing is sure everything is possible.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“When nothing is sure everything is possible.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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