Penelope Lively quotes - page 2

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not. (Penelope Lively)
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
Penelope Lively
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
Penelope Lively
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
Penelope Lively
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
Penelope Lively
I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
Penelope Lively
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.
Penelope Lively
Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
Penelope Lively
We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.
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)
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
Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.
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
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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
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
If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively