Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Drabble

Uncertainty, in Drabble's hands, isn’t a fog to stumble through; it’s a solvent that dissolves the false solidity of ordinary life. "When nothing is sure, everything is possible" flips the usual hierarchy. Certainty is typically marketed as safety, a kind of moral and practical insurance policy. Drabble suggests the opposite: that certainty is also a cage, a narrative people tell themselves to avoid the chaos of choice. The line works because it treats doubt not as a deficit but as an engine. If the ground won’t hold, you stop building the same house.

The subtext is quietly radical and very novelist-brained: identity is not a fixed asset but a provisional draft. Drabble’s fiction often lives in the domestic and the social - marriages, motherhood, class, the slow pressure of time - where "sure" can mean the roles you’re assigned and the expectations you inherit. Strip away the confidence that those roles are natural or permanent, and suddenly there’s room for revision. Possibility arrives the moment the old story loses its authority.

Context matters here: Drabble came of age alongside postwar British upheaval and second-wave feminism, eras that made stability feel suspect and tradition feel negotiable. The aphorism captures that mid-to-late 20th-century mood: institutions wobble, personal lives rearrange, and the future stops looking like a straight line. It’s not naive optimism; it’s a bracing reminder that ambiguity can be liberating, even if it’s also frightening.