We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from. — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
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… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the… — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard. — Penelope Lively Copy Share Image
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present. — 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
