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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
Way
Ambivalence
Always
Fragmented
Linear
Operation
Fascinated
Operations
Memory
Memories

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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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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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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I rather like getting away from fiction.
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People die, but money never does.
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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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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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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.
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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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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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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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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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.
Penelope Lively
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
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