Quote

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

More quotes by 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
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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
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Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
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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.
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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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There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
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The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
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 do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
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People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
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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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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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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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It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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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