Penelope Lively Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery.

Penelope Lively
The city feeds his mind, but in so doing he is manipulated by it, its sights and sounds condition his responses, he is its product and its creature. Neither can do without the other.

Penelope Lively
Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.

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

Penelope Lively
I have an iPad but I wouldn't dream of reading a book on it.

Penelope Lively
We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

Penelope Lively
If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Penelope Lively
There are two points at which I might use a Kindle: when travelling, though I don't do much of that any more, and when in hospital, which is quite likely to arise at some point. So that could be very useful. But as a general way of reading books, no. It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

Penelope Lively
This city is entirely in the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect.

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 something else.

Penelope Lively
Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

Penelope Lively
Are [children] reading less today? I have a nasty feeling they are.

Penelope Lively
The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

Penelope Lively
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 brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

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

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

Penelope Lively
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
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.

Penelope Lively
We all act as hinges — fortuitous links between other people.

Penelope Lively
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 self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

Penelope Lively
Far as I'm concerned, they're all still here, like a lot of dear little ghosts.

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

Penelope Lively
I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.

Penelope Lively
The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

Penelope Lively
His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally — as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Penelope Lively
An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on.

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

Penelope Lively
But who knows their own child? You know bits — certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.

Penelope Lively
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
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles — tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant.

Penelope Lively