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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
Choice
Choices
Happens
Seems
Everything
Disconcerting
Contingency

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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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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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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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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 make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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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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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I rather like getting away from fiction.
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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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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