I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“Other people's houses always intrigued her by the contrast they offered to Greystones; she would see suddenly -- with detached interest and… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“…crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“Don't you ever realise," said Helen, "that the way we live is unlike the way other people live?" "On the whole I… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“Thinks that it is a poor sort of life that has not known expectation, the pleasure of savoring ahead. So enjoy it… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“And now I want to get yesterday down while I still have the awful taste of it” — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,'… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history. — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.” — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are. — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
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… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
“I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
