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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

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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
Days
Insubstantial
Lives
Vanish
Reality
Enduring
Seems
Utterly
Invented
Endure
Seem
Fiction

More quotes by 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.
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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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There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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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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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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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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It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
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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'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.
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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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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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
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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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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
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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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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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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I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively