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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
Endure
Seem
Fiction
Days
Insubstantial
Lives
Vanish
Reality
Enduring
Seems
Utterly
Invented
More quotes by Penelope Lively
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
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
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
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
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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 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
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
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
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
