Top 50 Margaret Drabble Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When nothing is sure, everything is possible.”

— Margaret Drabble

2. “World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories – at all social levels – which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

4. “Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey’s end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.”

— Margaret Drabble

5. “A man’s greatest fear from a woman is that she will laugh at him; a woman’s fear is that a man will kill her.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

7. “Lucky in work, unlucky in love.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

9. “You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

14. “London, how could one ever be tired of it?”

— Margaret Drabble

15. “Scenery can be a violent stimulant.”

— Margaret Drabble

16. “Why can’t people be both flexible and efficient?”

— Margaret Drabble

17. “If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn’t have bothered to write them.”

— Margaret Drabble

18. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

19. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

20. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

21. “Nothing fails like failure.”

— Margaret Drabble

22. “The women are always vixens or monsters. They can’t just be normal people in the book.”

— Margaret Drabble

23. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

24. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

25. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

26. “On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can’t win.”

— Margaret Drabble

27. “I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

29. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

30. “I used to be a reasonably careless and adventurous person before I had children; now I am morbidly obsessed by seat-belts and constantly afraid that low-flying aircraft will drop on my children’s school.”

— Margaret Drabble

31. “Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.”

— Margaret Drabble

32. “Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie.”

— Margaret Drabble

33. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

34. “There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.”

— Margaret Drabble

35. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

36. “What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.”

— Margaret Drabble

37. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

38. “I’d rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

40. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

41. “I’ve always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.”

— Margaret Drabble

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

— Margaret Drabble

43. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

44. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Margaret Drabble

46. “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?”

— Margaret Drabble

47. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

48. “Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate.”

— Margaret Drabble

49. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble

50. “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.”

— Margaret Drabble