Quote

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

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Margaret Drabble
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 5
Biographer
Editor
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Sheffield
England
Free
Populated
Past
Stretches
Back
Caught
Children
Neither
Years
Parents
Parent
Thinned
Middle
Densely
Future
Thickly

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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.
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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.
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When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
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Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.
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Nothing fails like failure
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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.
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Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.
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Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?
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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.
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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.
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Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
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Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
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What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
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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.
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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.
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My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.
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If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
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Scenery can be a violent stimulant.
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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.
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The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.
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