MARGARET DRABBLE

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

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.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly 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.

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.

Nothing fails like failure.

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.

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

England's not a bad country? It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

London, how could one ever be tired of it?

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

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

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.

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

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.

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 supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.