Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Drabble

Drabble takes the most socially polished script for women - the home as refuge - and flips it into an indictment. The phrasing is doing the heavy lifting: "safest, most traditional, most approved of" reads like a list of endorsements stamped onto a life choice by everyone except the person living it. Safety here is revealed as a marketing term, not a condition. By the time she lands on "not a sanctuary", the reader has already felt how the idea of protection is built out of permission.

Then comes the turn of the knife: "perpetually, a dangerous place". Drabble doesn't argue that family can be dangerous; she insists on danger as the default setting, continuous rather than episodic. "Perpetually" matters because it points to structures, not scandals - the quiet, normalized vulnerabilities embedded in dependence, unpaid labor, marital power, and the way private space can shield harm from public scrutiny. "Dangerous" is broad enough to hold physical threat, emotional coercion, economic precarity, and the slow erosion of selfhood, without narrowing into a single headline-ready form of abuse.

As a postwar British novelist who made her name chronicling women's interior lives amid respectable institutions, Drabble is pushing back against the mid-century bargain: choose the approved role and you'll be protected. The subtext is feminist but unsloganeering: the home is where ideology gets enforced with tenderness, guilt, and routine. By calling out the family as a site of risk, she forces a more adult question than "What do we value?" - namely, who pays for those values, and who gets hurt when the cost is romanticized.