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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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Fascinated
Operations
Memory
Memories
Way
Ambivalence
Always
Fragmented
Linear
Operation

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
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.
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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.
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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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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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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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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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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Penelope Lively
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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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I rather like getting away from fiction.
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively