Quote

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

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
Fascinated
Operations
Memory
Memories
Way
Ambivalence
Always
Fragmented
Linear
Operation

More quotes by 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
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
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
If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
Image
Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
Image
People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
Image
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
Image
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
Image
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
Penelope Lively
Image
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
Image
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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
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
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
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
Penelope Lively
Image
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively