Quote

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

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
History
Collective
Past
Frequently
Require
Equally
Reinterpretation
Suits
Perceptions
Endless
Hence
Perception
Collectives
Present
Suit

More quotes by Penelope Lively

Image
Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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
All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Penelope Lively
Image
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
Image
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
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
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
Image
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
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'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
Image
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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
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 do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
Image
The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.
Penelope Lively
Image
People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively