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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
Contingency
Choice
Choices
Happens
Seems
Everything
Disconcerting

More quotes by 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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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
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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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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
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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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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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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People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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 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
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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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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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