Past Quotes by Penelope Lively

9 Past quotes by Penelope Lively

Lively’s nine succinct lines give the past a literary sheen without lingering. Each snippet reads like a tiny vignette, perfect for a quick pause on how memory shapes narrative.

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“My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.”

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its…

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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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

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

Penelope Lively

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The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the…

Penelope Lively

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“But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion…

Penelope Lively

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“It is not enough to live here and now. Not enough for me, anyway. I need those imaginative leaps out of my…

Penelope Lively

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More by Penelope Lively

“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

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“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

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

Penelope Lively

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“He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.”

Penelope Lively

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People die, but money never does.

Penelope Lively

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“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

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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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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

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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

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“I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of…

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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“The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.”

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters…

Penelope Lively

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