The Dark Flood Rises Quotes

“she too lives in and for words, for the words of others. Other men’s flowers. ‘These are other men’s flowers, only the string that binds them is my own.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“I’ve got selfish in my old age. I live as I like.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“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.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Dorothy will go, if she lasts that long.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“I’m not saying I wanted a bigger one, but it would have been interesting. You know what I mean?”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“It’s been a very long two months. She’d been a lot younger, two months ago. She’d been walking steadily on a plateau, for years, through her sixties into her seventies, but now she’s suddenly taken a step down. That’s what happens. She knows all about it. She’s been warned many times about this downwards step, this lower shelf. It’s not a cliff of fall, but it’s a descent to a new kind of plateau, to a lower level. You hope to stay there on the flat for a few more years, but you may not be so lucky.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Fran is proud of her perceptions. She still enjoys perceiving. When she ceases to enjoy perceiving, she’ll know she is about to be dead.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Her egg, when it arrives, is perfection. The yolk is soft, the white is firm. How is it, how is your egg, my angel, tenderly asks the kindly not-so-young woman. Perfect, says Fran, with emphasis. Perfect, she repeats. Yes, perfection. She reads the headlines and the lead story, moves to the continuation of the story on page two. She feels a powerful surge of happiness, a sense that all is well with the world, that she is in the right place at the right time, for this moment in time. She has had a good night, comfortable, pain-free, in a big white wide premier bed. And now she is at one with these munching people, she enjoys their enjoyment, as she spoons her chaste and perfect egg. And she is at one, through her almost-reliable friend of a newspaper, with the miscellaneous events of the turning world.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“She had sold their flat and moved to the east. She hadn’t wanted to live in Highgate on her own. She’d wanted a new place, a new life, for what was left of life.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“She is pleased to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work–life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It’s fucked up old age itself.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn’t offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn’t eat it, although they wouldn’t, but because meat doesn’t produce dripping any more. The meat isn’t real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it’s something else.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Here in the Black Country they call good food ‘bostin’ fittle’. Fittle means vittles. Good vittles, bostin’ fittle. They have their own language here. It hasn’t been knocked out of them yet.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Robots would save the elderly from the woes of the ageing flesh.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer?”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“Do you think preservatives make you live longer, or do they kill you off, asks Fran. She has often wondered about this.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“The dining area of the Premier Inn is geared to dispel elderly apprehensions, not to reinforce them. It is noisy and colourful and full of large busy middle-era middle England middle-aged people talking loudly and cheerfully and eating highly coloured meals, most of them from the hot red end of the spectrum.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be 'You bloody old fool' or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, 'you fucking idiot'.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“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 , The Dark Flood Rises