Penelope Lively Short Quotes

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My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment — closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.

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
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
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
Old age worry is its own climate, she reflects. Up against the wire, as you are, the proverbial bus is less of a concern: it is heading for you anyway.

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 on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.

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
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
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
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