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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.

Penelope Lively

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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Life
Woman
Often
Intrigued
Happens
Plain
Beautiful
Differently
Persons
Appearance
Person
Physical
Way
Direct
Things
Happen

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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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.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
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The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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People die, but money never does.
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
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I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Penelope Lively
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If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
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Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively