Penelope Lively Quotes

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.

Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.

And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford.

When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.

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 ...

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

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

The world is full of widows--several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage--forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience--everywhere, always--so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn't tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come--not so much to feel as to understand.

It is not enough to live here and now. Not enough for me, anyway. I need those imaginative leaps out of my own time frame and into other places - places where things were done differently. Reading has provided me with that, for the most part, but it is objects, things like these scraps of pottery, that have most keenly conjured up all those elsewheres - inaccessible but eerily available to the imagination. The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can't begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened - that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece - and all those other sherds in the cake tin - expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Time and the universe lie around in our minds. We are sleeping histories of the world.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

How many men have asked you to marry them?'

'Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.

We expect Armageddon; the Bible has trained us well. We assume either annihilation or salvation, perhaps both. Millennarian beliefs are as old as time; the apocalypse has always been at hand. People have lain quaking in their beds waiting for the year one thousand, have cowered at the passage of comets, have prayed their way through eclipses. Our particular anxieties would seem on the face of things more rational, but they have an inescapable ancestry. The notion that things go on for ever is recent, and evidently too recent to attract much of a following. The world being what it is, it has always been tempting to assume that something would be done about it, sooner or later.

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

But more usually I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity. We are not especially interesting, by and large--waiting for a bus, walking along the street; younger people are busy sizing up one another, in the way that children in a park will only register other children. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed, which I rather like; it leaves me free to do what a novelist does anyway, listen and watch, but with the added spice of feeling a little as though I am some observant time-traveller, on the edge of things, bearing witness to the customs of another age.

You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps--myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative--perpetual rage and resentment--would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.
That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

People die, but money never does.

I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.

I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away.

I want to live somewhere where it rains a lot and things grow furiously. I want to see the fruits of the earth multiply and all that sort of thing. I want to make provision for the future. I want to lay up riches on earth since I don't believe in heaven. Not material riches - I want green fields and fat cows and oak trees.

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.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Belbroughton Road, Linton Road, Bardwell Road. The houses there are quite normal. They are ordinary sizes and have ordinary chimneys and roofs and gardens with laburnum and flowering cherry. Park Town. As you go south they are growing. Getting higher and odder. By the time you get to Norham Gardens they have tottered over the edge into madness: these are not houses but flights of fancy. They are three storeys high and disguise themselves as churches. They have ecclesiastical porches instead of front doors and round norman windows or pointed gothic ones, neatly grouped in threes with flaring brick to set them off. They reek of hymns and the Empire, Mafeking and the Khyber Pass, Mr Gladstone and Our Dear Queen. They have nineteen rooms and half a dozen chimneys and iron fire-escapes. A bomb couldn't blow them up and the privet in their gardens has survived two World Wars.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Thinks that it is a poor sort of life that has not known expectation, the pleasure of savoring ahead. So enjoy it while you have it, he tells himself.

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

When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.

God shall have a starring role in my history of the world. How could it be otherwise? If He exists, then He is responsible for the whole marvellous appalling narrative. If He does not, then the very proposition that He might have killed more people and exercised more minds than anything else. He dominates the stage. In His name has been devised the rack, the thumbscrew, the Iron Maiden, the stake; for Him have people been crucified, flayed alive, fried, boiled, flattened; He has generated the Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisition and more wars than I can number. But for Him there would not be the St Mathews Passion, the works of Michelangelo and Chartres Cathedral.

I am afraid of the run-up to death, because I have had to watch that. But I think that many of us who are on the last lap are too busy with the baggage of old age to waste much time anticipating the finishing line. We have to get used to being the person we are, the person we have always been, but encumbered now with various indignities and disabilities, shoved as it were into some new incarnation. We feel much the same, but clearly are not. We have entered an unexpected dimension; dealing with this is the new challenge.

Early reading is serendipitous, and rightly so. Gloriously so. Libraries favor serendipity, invite it; the roaming along a shelf, eyeing an unfamiliar name, taking this down, then that--oh, who's this? Never heard of her--give her a go? That is where, and how, you learn affinity and rejection. You find out what you like by exploring what you do not.

Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind ( ... ).

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Don't you ever realise," said Helen, "that the way we live is unlike the way other people live?"

"On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.

I wasn't thinking of Tom but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be mot 'me' but 'she.' An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom ... I had hesitated to make this journey, had put it off year after year but had known always that eventually it must be undertaken. And, confronted at last with the mirage
with the shining phantom of that other time
I was surprised to find that it was myself that was the poignant presence.

In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.

Behind and byond her looks,her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it, back then, he thought. All you saw was her face.

Any book represents effort, struggle, work--I know, I write them myself--every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal.

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.

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. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

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

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

You plot, daily. Face down circumstance. Measure out your life with...not coffee spoons--pills. Line them up with breakfast, lunch, supper. Never mind mermaids, and lilacs in bloom, and all that stuff. He hadn't a clue.

Perhaps there is always something in our head that is ready to learn.

And now I want to get yesterday down while I still have the awful taste of it

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. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?

I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything ...

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

My house is full of books. I suppose that I have read all of them, bar reference books and poetry collections in which I will not have read every poem. I have forgotten many, indeed most. At some point, I have emptied each of these into that insatiable vessel, the mind, and they are now lost somewhere within. If I reopen a book, there is recognition--oh yes, I've been here--but to have the contents again, familiar, new-minted, I would have to read right through. What happens to all this information, this inferno of language? Where does it go? Much, apparently, becomes irretrievable sediment; a fair amount, the significant amount, becomes that essential part of us--what we know and understand and think about above and beyond our own immediate concerns. It has become the life of the mind. What we have read makes us what we are--quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

I can measure out my life in books. They stand along the way like signposts: the moments of absorption and empathy and direction and enlightenment and sheer pleasure.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.

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.

The regrets of old age are polarized: you wish you had not done certain things--behaved thus, responded like that--and you wish you had seized more of the day, been greedier, packed more in.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

The house squatted around them, vast, empty, unnecessary and indestructible. You had to be a fat busy Victorian family to expand enough to fill up basements and passages and conservatives and attics. You had to have an army of bootboys and nurses and parlourmaids. You had to have a complicated greedy system of living that used up plenty of space and people and just in the daily business of eating and sleeping and keeping clean. You had to multiply your requirements and your possessions, activate that panel of bells in the kitchen - Drawing-Room and Master Bedroom and Library - keep going a spiral of needs and people to satisfy the needs. if you did not, if you contracted into three people without such needs, then a house like this became a dinosaur, occupying too much air and ground and demanding to be fed new sinks and drainpipes and a sea of electricity. Such a house became a fossil, stranded among neighbours long since chopped up into flats and bed-sitting-rooms, or sleek modern houses that had a suitable number of rooms for correct living in the late twentieth century. It and its kind, stood awkwardly on the fringes of a city renowned for old and beautiful buildings: they were old, and unbeautiful.

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.

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 ...

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

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood
we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

She saw the shadows of her children, young again, playing on that tree. And now to be here with him. You cross your own path.

The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don't work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of John Aubrey, of Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you.

Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.

People are always meaning well,' said Edward. 'That's often the trouble.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

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.

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.

I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.

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.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.

Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling--I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug.

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.

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

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.

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.

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

An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time.