Penelope Lively Quotes

55 quotes in 830 categories

• 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…
• Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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.…
• I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
• I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and…
• 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…
• It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
• 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…
• The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
• 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…
• The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
• I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
• Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
• I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

Browse Penelope Lively Quotes by Category