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Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them. - Quote by Margaret Drabble

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering–that you’re supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn’t have bothered to write them.

Margaret Drabble
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The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermit-tent gloom.
Margaret Drabble
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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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
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.
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.
Margaret Drabble
When nothing is sure everything is possible.
Margaret Drabble
It is to be doubted whether anybody who said good-bye to Bert had any faith or interest whatsoever in the life everlasting. This life had, some of them thought, been quite bad enough.
Margaret Drabble
Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents had on their shelves a copy of Brewer's 'Dictionary of Phase and fable', a book which, as a teenager, she would morbidly browse for hours. One of her favourite sections was 'Dying Sayings', with its fine mix of the pious, the complacent, the apocryphal, the bathetic and the defiant. Artists had fared well: Beethoven was alleged to have said 'I shall hear in heaven'; the erotic painter Etty had declared 'Wonderful! Wonderful this death!'; and Keats had died bravely, generously comforting his poor friend Severn.Those about to be executed had clearly had time to prepare a fine last thought, and of these she favoured the romantic Walter Raleigh's, 'It matters little how the head lies, so the heart be right'. Harriet Martineau, who had suffered so much as a child from religion, as Fran had later discovered, had stoically remarked, 'I see no reason why the existence of Harriet Martineau should be perpetuated', an admirably composed sentiment which had caught the child Fran's attention long before she knew who Harriet Martineau was. But most of all she had liked the parting of Siward the Dane who had commended his men: 'Lift me up that I may die standing, not lying down like a cow'.
Margaret Drabble
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