Penelope Lively Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All history, of course, is the history of wars. — Penelope Lively

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

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

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once. — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood
we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule. — 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

For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix. — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rather like getting away from fiction. — Penelope Lively

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

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without. — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford. — Penelope Lively

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

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons. — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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

I wasn't thinking of Tom but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be mot 'me' but 'she.' An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom ... I had hesitated to make this journey, had put it off year after year but had known always that eventually it must be undertaken. And, confronted at last with the mirage
with the shining phantom of that other time
I was surprised to find that it was myself that was the poignant presence. — Penelope Lively

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

People die, but money never does. — Penelope Lively

She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer. — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing. — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.
That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time. — Penelope Lively

You learn a lot, writing fiction. — 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

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales ... from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover ... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster ... — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance. — Penelope Lively

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

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

My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined. — Penelope Lively

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls ... — Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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