Penelope Lively Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

  Penelope Lively

  Believe, Maturity, Childhood

  Penelope Lively (2006). “Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived”, p.9, Penguin UK

  7 Copy quote

• You learn a lot, writing fiction.

  Penelope Lively

  Writing, Fiction, Writing Fiction

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• Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

  Penelope Lively

  Atoms, World, Language

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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 Egypt.

  Penelope Lively

  Successful, Egypt, Jerusalem

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• Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

  Penelope Lively

  Messages, Stuff, Logic

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

  Penelope Lively

  Curiosity, Knows, Getting To Know Someone

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• 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. Plant ourselves in their lives.

  Penelope Lively

  People, Giving, Way

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.90, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

  Penelope Lively

  Science, Past, Aspect

  "I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2001.

  25 Copy quote

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

  Penelope Lively

  Writing, Climate, Novel

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• All history, of course, is the history of wars.

  Penelope Lively

  War, History, Courses

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.25, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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

  Penelope Lively

  Thinking, Mets, Ifs

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Consequences”, p.80, Penguin

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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

  Past, Perception, Suits

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• I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

  Penelope Lively

  Dawn, Moments, Innocent

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.15, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

  Penelope Lively

  Mind, Want, Sparks

  Penelope Lively (2012). “How It All Began: A Novel”, p.51, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

  Penelope Lively

  Block, Grief, Eye

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.58, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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 I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster.

  Penelope Lively

  Dream, Flower, Moving

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• I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

  Penelope Lively

  Writing, Fiction, Mixtures

  "'I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2001.

  7 Copy quote

• I rather like getting away from fiction.

  Penelope Lively

  Fiction, Get Away

  "I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2001.

  4 Copy quote

• I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

  Penelope Lively

  Children, Thinking, Might

  "'I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2001.

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

  Penelope Lively

  Memories, Way, Linear

  64 Copy quote

• 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 search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.

  Penelope Lively

  Science, Glasses, Cities

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• I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

  Penelope Lively

  Country, Home, Grandmother

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• The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

  Penelope Lively

  Loss, Thinking, Lost Friendship

  "'I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2001.

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• 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 somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

  Penelope Lively

  Writing, Social, Century

  "'I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2001.

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• History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

  Penelope Lively

  History, Natural, Circumstances

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.11, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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