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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Fiction
Days
Insubstantial
Lives
Vanish
Reality
Enduring
Seems
Utterly
Invented
Endure
Seem

More quotes by Penelope Lively

Image
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
Image
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
Image
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
Image
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
Image
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
Image
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.
Penelope Lively
Image
History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
Image
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
Image
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
Image
People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively