Penelope Lively Quotes
Collection of top 61 famous quotes about Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Penelope Lively quotes, sayings and quotations 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.
— Penelope Lively
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
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
— Penelope Lively
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
— Penelope Lively
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
— Penelope Lively
It seems to her that your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown.
— Penelope Lively
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
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
— Penelope Lively
People die, but money never does.
— Penelope Lively
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
— Penelope Lively
There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
— Penelope Lively
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
— Penelope Lively
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
— Penelope Lively
For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.
— Penelope Lively
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
History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
— Penelope Lively
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
The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.
— Penelope Lively
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
— Penelope Lively
Like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.
— Penelope Lively
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
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
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
— Penelope Lively
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
Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind ( ... ).
— Penelope Lively
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
— Penelope Lively
If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
— Penelope Lively
I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything ...
— Penelope Lively
Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.
— Penelope Lively
All history, of course, is the history of wars.
— Penelope Lively
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
The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
— Penelope Lively
So now we are young still but a better sort of young.
— Penelope Lively
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
We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.
— Penelope Lively
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
— Penelope Lively
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
— Penelope Lively
My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.
— Penelope Lively
I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.
— Penelope Lively
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
— Penelope Lively
I have no idea where I am going, she thought, but I have begun.
— Penelope Lively
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
— Penelope Lively
Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.
— Penelope Lively
Perhaps there is always something in our head that is ready to learn.
— Penelope Lively
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
History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
— Penelope Lively
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
— Penelope Lively
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
— Penelope Lively
I rather like getting away from fiction.
— Penelope Lively
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
— Penelope Lively
Gina has always regarded relationships as shifty business: count on nothing, nothing is forever.
— Penelope Lively
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
— Penelope Lively
Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.
— Penelope Lively
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
— Penelope Lively
