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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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Even
Hardly
Time
Exists
Concern
Fiction
Tricky
Becomes
Concerns
Present
Medium
Happens
Mediums
Past
Central
More quotes by Penelope Lively
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
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
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.
Penelope Lively
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
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.
Penelope Lively
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
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
Penelope Lively
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
Penelope Lively
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
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
If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
Penelope Lively
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
