Penelope Lively

“A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The…

— 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…

— Penelope Lively

“So now we are young still but a better sort of young.”

— Penelope Lively

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the…

— Penelope Lively

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen…

— 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

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments,…

— Penelope Lively

“It becomes more and more difficult to credit Lisa with being a quarter Russian. Somewhere and within and behind this quintessentially middle-class…

— Penelope Lively

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

— Penelope Lively

“I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story…

— Penelope Lively

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its…

— Penelope Lively

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you…

— Penelope Lively

“I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything…

— 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…

— Penelope Lively

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

— Penelope Lively

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever…

— Penelope Lively

“God shall have a starring role in my history of the world. How could it be otherwise? If He exists, then He…

— Penelope Lively

“Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem. (...) She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how…

— Penelope Lively

“You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation…

— 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 can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and…

— 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…

— Penelope Lively

But who knows their own child? You know bits - certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable.…

— 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…

— Penelope Lively

“When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.”

— Penelope Lively