Quote

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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Broken
Sweets
Longer
Jars
Hours
Linear
Next
Contained
Self
Bright
Like
Brilliant
Refracted
Hundred
Assorted
Sweet
Segments

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
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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.
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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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.
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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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If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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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.
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In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.
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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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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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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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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the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
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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There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
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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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively