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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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Happens
Seems
Everything
Disconcerting
Contingency
Choice
Choices

More quotes by 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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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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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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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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 rather like getting away from fiction.
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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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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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
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'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 do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively