The Millstone Quotes

“Lucky in work, unlucky in love.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“I did not realize the dreadful facts of life. I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“And even then, even at that moment, I did not have the courage to ask him where he lived, or to ask him what his phone number was, for it would have seemed an intrusion, an assumption that I had a right to know, that a future existed where it would be of use to know. I see, oh yes I see that my diffidence, my desire not to offend looks like enough to coldness, looks like enough to indifference, and perhaps I mean it to, but this is not what it feels like in my head. But I cannot get out and say, Where do you live, give me your number, ring me, can I ring you? In case I am not wanted. In case I am tedious. So I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep...”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“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.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“for an incestuous friendship will outlive, as I have discovered, any passionate love.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“I had the additional disadvantage of being unable to approve my own conduct; being a child of the age, I knew how wrong and how misguided it was. I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“(...) there's a difference between what happens to one in real life and what one can make real in art.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone