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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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Past
Frequently
Require
Equally
Reinterpretation
Suits
Perceptions
Endless
Hence
Perception
Collectives
Present
Suit
History
Collective

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
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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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It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
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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.
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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.
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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 rather like getting away from fiction.
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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.
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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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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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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.
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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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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively