Margaret Drabble Quotes

Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

I always did think that when I turned 40, I'd start coming into my own.

Speaking personally, I didn't think 40 would be a big issue, and I don't think I have issues about age, but there are naturally some big questions that come up at that point in your life.

42 is a really boring age, isn't it?

I feel a bit weird about turning 40. It makes you feel like you've passed over on to the other side a bit.

I know some good old gals in their 50s and 60s. All these women tell me, 'Forty to 50. Those are the hot times.' So far, you couldn't prove it by me. But hell, I'm only two years in.

He is already past the high point in his life and coming down on the other side. By next week he'll be nostalgia. He's 12 years old, and it's over for him.

The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.

Adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

We really feel the fact of our mortality after we turn forty years old.

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

Adolescence begins when children stop asking questions-because they know all the answers.

At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.

Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

And you're figuring out who you are, and you haven't yet become stagnant in your thinking. You haven't solidified. And one thing that I find is that a lot of grown-ups tend to look back on their high school or middle school years and say, "Oh, thank God all that's over."

I'm over 30 now, but I didn't expect to be here.

When you have a 13 year old child, you suddenly realize that you may need to pick a vocation.

School, in general, was not great. Children are just mean to each other... but by high school, I probably stopped being annoying to people, and people stopped being mean. By the end of it, it was wonderful.

It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.