Top 89 Penelope Lively Quotes
#1. I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
Penelope Lively
#2. History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
Penelope Lively
#4. I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles
tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.
Penelope Lively
#5. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
#6. I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Penelope Lively
#7. He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.
Penelope Lively
#8. If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
#9. There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
#10. I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.
Penelope Lively
#11. Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
Penelope Lively
#13. Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.
Penelope Lively
#14. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.
Penelope Lively
#15. Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
#16. Like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.
Penelope Lively
#17. A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery
Penelope Lively
#18. All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.
Penelope Lively
#20. Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.
Penelope Lively
#21. Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind ( ... ).
Penelope Lively
#22. The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.
Penelope Lively
#23. And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.
Penelope Lively
#24. It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
#25. I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
#26. I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.
Penelope Lively
#27. The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
Penelope Lively
#28. You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.
Penelope Lively
#29. I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
#30. We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.
Penelope Lively
#31. Thinks that it is a poor sort of life that has not known expectation, the pleasure of savoring ahead. So enjoy it while you have it, he tells himself.
Penelope Lively
#32. There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
Penelope Lively
#33. Rose said: 'Some people would be needing their spare glasses, or that blue cardigan. You need a book. Of course.'
'A deficiency?'said Charlotte meekly.
'Not at all. The need defines you, that's all.
Penelope Lively
#34. My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.
Penelope Lively
#35. When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.
Penelope Lively
#36. Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.
Penelope Lively
#37. I have no idea where I am going, she thought, but I have begun.
Penelope Lively
#38. I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.
Penelope Lively
#39. Behind and byond her looks,her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it, back then, he thought. All you saw was her face.
Penelope Lively
#40. I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
Penelope Lively
#41. But who knows their own child? You know bits - certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.
Penelope Lively
#42. The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
#43. I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
Penelope Lively
#44. The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.
Penelope Lively
#45. Far as I'm concerned, they're all still here, like a lot of dear little ghosts.
Penelope Lively
#46. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything ...
Penelope Lively
#47. It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?
Penelope Lively
#48. I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
Penelope Lively
#49. For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.
Penelope Lively
#50. An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time.
Penelope Lively
#51. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
Penelope Lively
#52. Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.
Penelope Lively
#53. Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.
Penelope Lively
#54. Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.
Penelope Lively
#55. And now I want to get yesterday down while I still have the awful taste of it
Penelope Lively
#56. We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
#57. She saw the shadows of her children, young again, playing on that tree. And now to be here with him. You cross your own path.
Penelope Lively
#58. I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.
Penelope Lively
#59. Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
Penelope Lively
#60. In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.
Penelope Lively
#61. Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.
Penelope Lively
#64. If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
#65. The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.
Penelope Lively
#66. I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
Penelope Lively
#67. Gina has always regarded relationships as shifty business: count on nothing, nothing is forever.
Penelope Lively
#68. I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
Penelope Lively
#69. Perhaps there is always something in our head that is ready to learn.
Penelope Lively
#70. It seems to her that your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown.
Penelope Lively
#71. I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
Penelope Lively
#73. They sat for several hours over a pot of tea and a plate of cake, and then they wandered the streets, impervious to time. By the end of the day, both realised that their lives had altered course.
Penelope Lively
#74. Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
#75. The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
Penelope Lively
#76. The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
#77. She read to find out what it was like to be French or Russian in the nineteenth century, to be a rich New Yorker then, or a Midwestern pioneer. She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.
Penelope Lively
#78. The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
Penelope Lively
#79. The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.
Penelope Lively
#80. We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
Penelope Lively
#81. You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.
Penelope Lively
#82. Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
#83. Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.
Penelope Lively
#84. We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
#85. Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
Penelope Lively
#86. It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
#88. I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
#89. It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.
Penelope Lively
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