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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

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
Make
Foiled
Happenstance
Constantly
Choices

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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People die, but money never does.
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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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
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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.
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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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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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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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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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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