Penelope Lively - Moon Tiger (1987)

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

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

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

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