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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

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
Moments
Accelerates
Accelerate
Arrivals
Addicted
Dawn
Innocent
History

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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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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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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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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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
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
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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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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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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. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.
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