Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Drabble

Drabble’s line nails a paradox that modern life keeps trying to outsource to wellness apps: we’re sturdier than we think, but our stamina depends on the pattern of pain. “Plenty of reality” is her demystifying phrase for the daily load of work, bills, caregiving, disappointment - the ordinary, continuous weather of being alive. The mind, she suggests, can adapt to that. It’s “intermittent gloom” that breaks us: the stop-start pulses of dread, the sudden drops after a stretch of calm, the sense that darkness can return at any moment.

The intent isn’t to romanticize suffering; it’s to diagnose a particular psychological cruelty. Intermittency prevents habituation. When gloom is constant, you develop rituals, language, even a grim competence. When it arrives in unpredictable episodes, it colonizes the in-between time, turning relief into vigilance. Drabble is writing as a novelist attuned to interior life, and the sentence reads like fiction’s quiet rebuttal to heroic narratives of endurance. She isn’t praising stoicism; she’s exposing how fragile “normal” becomes when it’s repeatedly interrupted.

The subtext has a social edge. “Reality” can be borne because it’s shareable and nameable; “gloom” is more private, often shame-tinged, and harder to justify to others when it comes and goes. That intermittent quality also mirrors modern news cycles and precarious economies: long stretches of managed coping punctured by spikes of crisis. Drabble’s wit is in the understatement. She makes suffering sound almost logistical, which is exactly how it feels when you’re trying to schedule a life around the possibility of collapse.