Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd DBE FRSL, is an English novelist, biographer, and critic...
iraq done world
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,
nice guilt body
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.
failure failing
Nothing fails like failure
men greatest-fear laughing
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.
views stories literature
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.
desire facts conform
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
thinking accomplishment sometimes
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
book writing bothered
If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
book people vixens
The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
reality mind too-much
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.
unjust vices life-is
How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.
expectations people needs
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.
jobs war teaching
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.
lord terror infant
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.