Quote

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Penelope Lively

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
Image
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.
Penelope Lively
Image
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
Penelope Lively
Image
All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Penelope Lively
Image
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
Image
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
Image
There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
Penelope Lively
Image
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
Image
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
Image
If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
Image
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
Image
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
Image
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively