"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 Literature See all quotes by Margaret Drabble →

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More by Margaret Drabble

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“TPR Interview - Barbara Milton Interviews Drabble”

Resonant Thoughts

"I think that the audience for poetry has widened in recent years and maybe it's continuing to widen—I hope so. The whole poetry slam phenomenon has created an interest and widened the audience for poe…"

— Nathaniel Mackey

Literature1947

#life

"Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future - she could see it - this would not be happening."

— Daniel Handler

Literature1970

#nature

"I shall work for the Republican party and call on all women to join me, precisely... for what that party has done and promises to do for women, nothing more, nothing less."

— Susan B. Anthony

Social Activism1820–1906

#art

"Augmentation, on the other hand, Mr. President, is defined in the GAB as the act of filling up a deficiency in any existing P/A/P of an agency or office from savings in other items of the said agency’…"

— Francis Escudero

Politics1969

#politics