Penelope Lively Quotes
Top 61 wise famous quotes and sayings by Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Penelope Lively on Wise Famous 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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?
The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
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.
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
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.
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.