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

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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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.
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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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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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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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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There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
Penelope Lively
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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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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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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.
Penelope Lively
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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.
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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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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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively