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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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Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
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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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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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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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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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If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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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.
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.
Penelope Lively
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
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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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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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I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
Penelope Lively
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I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
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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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There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
Penelope Lively