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I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

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
Grew
Eternally
Agnostic
James
Version
Versions
King
Grateful
Kings

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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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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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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
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I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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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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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There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
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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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
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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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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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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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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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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