Penelope Lively Quotes

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

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.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

It seems to her that your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown.

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.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

People die, but money never does.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.

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.

The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

Like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.

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.

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

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.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

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.

Far as I'm concerned, they're all still here, like a lot of dear little ghosts.

Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind ( ... ).

If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything ...

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

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?

He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.

The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

So now we are young still but a better sort of young.

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.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

I have no idea where I am going, she thought, but I have begun.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.

Perhaps there is always something in our head that is ready to learn.

And now I want to get yesterday down while I still have the awful taste of it

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.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Gina has always regarded relationships as shifty business: count on nothing, nothing is forever.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.