79 Quotes by Margaret Drabble

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.

I look back now with some anguish to each touch and glance, to every changing conjunction of limbs and heads and hands. I have lived it over every day for so long now that I am in danger of forgetting the true shape of how it was, because each time I go over it I wish that I had given a little more here or there, or at the very least said what was in my heart, so that he could have known how much it meant to me. But I was incapable, even when happy, of exposing myself thus far.

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.

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.

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

Why can’t people be both flexible and efficient?

Lucky in work, unlucky in love.

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.

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.