Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd DBE FRSL, is an English novelist, biographer, and critic...
imagination kind imagine
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.
travel discovery people
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.
teaching book people
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
children school flying
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.
mother winning cant-win
On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.
tired london
London, how could one ever be tired of it?
violent scenery stimulants
Scenery can be a violent stimulant.
fate birth abandoned
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...
trying needs print
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.
wisdom simple misery
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
dying tradition ends
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
poverty poor scales
Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
journey deception may
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.
too-much enough admirer
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.