Penelope Lively Quotes

• We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Latin, Museums, Lexicon

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

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• Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

  Penélope Lively

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.163, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Past, Years, Privacy

  Penelope Lively (2012). “How It All Began: A Novel”, p.174, Penguin

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• Todos necesitamos un pasado: de ahí procede nuestro sentido de la identidad.

  Penélope Lively

  Past, Identity, Needs

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• It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

  Penélope Lively

  Lying, Nerd, Library

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• Tomamos decisiones, pero la casualidad nos frustra constantemente.

  Penélope Lively

  Choices, Happenstance

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• It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

  Penélope Lively

  Everything Happens For A Reason, Choices, Contingency

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• The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

  Penélope Lively

  Past, Fiction, Tricky

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• I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

  Penélope Lively

  Beautiful, Way, Appearance

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• 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Lying, Years, Forever

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Consequences”, p.39, Penguin

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• Todos actuamos como bisagras: vínculos fortuitos entre otras personas.

  Penélope Lively

  Work, People, Links

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.143, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• En la vejez, uno se da cuenta de que, aunque la juventud le separe décadas, puede cerrar los ojos y evocarla a voluntad. Como escritor, esto supone una clara ventaja.

  Penélope Lively

  Eye, Science, Age

  "A life in books: Penelope Lively". Interview with Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. July 24, 2009.

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

  Penélope Lively

  Fashion, Believe, People

  Penelope Lively (2012). “How It All Began: A Novel”, p.147, Penguin

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• The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

  Penélope Lively

  Memories, Ideas, Mind

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• Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.

  Penélope Lively

  Book, Reading, Support Systems

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

  Penélope Lively

  Children, War, Boys

  1987 Moon Tiger, ch.8.

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

  Penélope Lively

  Reality, Fiction, Endure

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Sweet, Self, Broken

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• I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

  Penélope Lively

  Character, Occupation, Fictional Character

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• The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

  Penélope Lively

  Writing, Character, Alternatives

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• 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Duelo

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.104, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.

  Penélope Lively

  Spring, Childhood, Church

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• 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Children, Giving, Design

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• 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.

  Penélope Lively

  Believe, Maturity, Childhood

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

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• All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

  Penélope Lively

  Reading, Writing, Names

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