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Penelope Lively Biography

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“What these books and their like have done for me is tap into some roaming tendency of the mind; I know that I could never have done what these writers have done, been where they have been, pursued the interests they have pursued, but I want to know what it is like. We go to fiction to extend experience, to get beyond our own, For me, this kind of non-fiction writer is furnishing the same need--taking me out of my own comfortable expectations and showing me how it might be elsewhere. Armchair travel? Not quite. I have never believed that travel broadens the mind, having known some well-travelled minds that were nicely atrophied. Rather, these are books--experiences--that encourage a leap of the imagination.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“I am afraid of the run-up to death, because I have had to watch that. But I think that many of us who are on the last lap are too busy with the baggage of old age to waste much time anticipating the finishing line. We have to get used to being the person we are, the person we have always been, but encumbered now with various indignities and disabilities, shoved as it were into some new incarnation. We feel much the same, but clearly are not. We have entered an unexpected dimension; dealing with this is the new challenge.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“And this is the most provocative situation, is it not? It invites abuse, manipulation, tyranny, subjection. A person is supposed to accommodate herself--himself--absolutely to another person. It is unnatural. OK, but it's nature that sets it up in the first place. Of course, of course. It is unnatural and provocative and precarious and challenging. It demands forbearance and stamina and abnormal powers of empathy and perception. It is also... And yes, it is also all those other things. The opposite. The converse. The place you want to be.”

LoveSelfRelationshipsEmpathyForbearanceAccomodation
Book:The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
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“And in any case, I am someone else now. This seems to contradict earlier assertions that you are in old age the person you always were. What I mean is that old age has different needs, different satisfactions, a different outlook. I remember my young self, and I am not essentially changed, but I perform otherwise today. There are things I no longer want, things I no longer do, things that are now important.”

LifeSelfYouthAgingOld AgeSameness
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles -- tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant.... I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently -- it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable.”

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Book:Moon Tiger
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“Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.”

ThinkingLifeReadingLearningBooksPersonalityAgingOld AgeLibraries
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“...collective memory is unevenly distributed: some people have a rich and deep resource, for others it is minimal. A matter of education, and also of inclination. But however minimal, however threadbare, it is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came. That is why history should be taught in school, to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.”

PastTimeUnderstandingEducationHistoryLearningMemory
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“When I was a child they used to take us to this beach, and I would look and look at the sea, knowing that where I came from was somewhere out there. I saw it as an island. A small German island with my town, my house, my parents, exactly as I left it all." She stared across the table - dark intense eyes under a black fringe streaked with grey. " You don't have a map in your head as a child. Later, you have the globe - the seas and the shapes - and you can't ever get back to that emptiness, that mystery. Knowing that there are other places, but not knowing where they are, or how to get there.”

Growing UpChildhood
Book:City of the Mind
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“And so they ride through the city, father and child, seeing, each, a different place. Jane, with the liberation of childhood, without rationality or expectations, sees an anarchic landscape in which anything is possible and many things are provocative. She wrestles with language, scans advertisements, shop-signs, logos on vans and trucks. She pays professional attention to other children, in the way that animals are most sensitive to their own species. She searches out the things that tether her to a known world — a bus with a familiar destination, a hoarding that proclaims her favourite brand of chocolate, Volkswagen cars that are like her father’s. Hers is a heliocentric universe, and she is the sun. She is fettered by a child’s careless egotism, but freed from adult preconceptions. She does not know what to expect, and can therefore assess what she sees in its own terms. She does not interpret, and therefore can construct her own system of references. The Arabic script on the windows of the Bank of Kuwait becomes little dancing figures. The caryatids outside the church in Euston Road are ladies wearing bath towels with books on their heads. For her, the city is alternately mysterious and familiar, baffling and instructive. She tests her own capacities against the view from the window of the bus; she rhymes and puns, she counts, she classifies. She plays games with words and sounds, she flexes her imagination, she takes the place as she sees it and twists it to her own ends.”

Growing UpChildhood
Book:City of the Mind
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“Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.”

ChangeDestinyGrowing UpPersonalityAgingNature Vs Nurture
Book:Passing On
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“You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps--myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative--perpetual rage and resentment--would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“She thought how curious it was that responses such as this--emotions, even--could run parallel with but quite separate from unhappiness. I am unhappy all the time, she thought, and that is a total occupation, but some other part of me still goes on working. I still see that things are beautiful, or significant, and that prompts a feeling. I can be angry, or pleased. But all this with detachment, as though it happened to someone else. It is as though half of me were some stranger, living independently.”

FeelingsGriefEmotionsMourningEmptinessUnhappinessBereavementDetachment
Book:Perfect Happiness
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“She was obsessed, isolated, locked within herself, in feverish pursuit. She knew that something disastrous was happening to her, that possibly she was going mad, and she knew also that if she ceased for one moment to think about Steven, to carry him with her in her head, she might lose him. He was dead; he only existed in recollection; when recollection ceased even that tenuous existence would be gone. A name, no more. Like the host of names on the white tombstones of Bunhill Fields burial ground; the silent army beneath the soil.”

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Book:Perfect Happiness
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“She wondered why happiness should be so acutely remembered when sorrow vanishes, like pain. Those brilliant tethered moments are seldom black. I was often miserable--but some kindly (or perverse) mechanism of the memory fades out all that, leaving quite other things, and hence an untruthful whole. We quarrelled, but all I have now of those quarrels is a pungent taste, not words nor phrases but a flavour: his silent back, my churning resentment.”

RelationshipsMemoriesLossGriefSorrowMourningQuarrelsBereavementMarriages
Book:Perfect Happiness
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“Ruth Bowers laid her hand, as she spoke, on Frances's arm and the physical contact was like a burn, distracting her totally. Two days after Steven's death she had lain in bed and thought, I shall never again feel someone else's arms round me, another person's body close up against mine, not sex, not nakedness, just physical closeness, often, casually, with another human being. And now the touch of others--Zoe's quick hugs, Tabitha's dutiful brushing of the cheek--had this disproportionate effect. To be touched was both a sacrilege and a joy.”

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Book:Perfect Happiness
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“Most of my friends have been in therapy at one time or another and you know what puzzles me about it? It's the idea that there's any kind of tidy answer to things. Life doesn't seem to me like that--it's a mess. But most people--or at least most people back home--go at it like they were after the secret of the universe. Just find the right formula and you'll get happy. You'll hit on the answer like you might hit on the right colour-scheme for the living-room and the sun will come out and shine for ever after. Coming to terms with life, that's what it's called. But personally I don't see how you come to terms with something that's basically fouled-up in a lot of ways. And I don't call that pessimism, I call it common sense. You know what I think? I think it's a misplaced faith in science. This is a scientific age and by heavens it ought to come up with a scientific answer to everything. Even how to get through life without trouble.”

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Book:Perfect Happiness
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“It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquillity concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie - or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is pushing a product. As for autobiography... And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many confliction points of view, they provoke thoughts, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting new precedents, the bleats and cries of new opinion, new fashion, new style, The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.”

ReadingLibraries
Book:Consequences
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“He did not want to be young again -- that time had had particular and transcendent horrors -- but the thought of being any older filled him with panic. He could not imagine finding tranquility of soul in old age; if he could only be allowed to mark time for a while all might yet be well, one might suddenly achieve equilibrium, certainty, serenity. There would still be possibilities. Hopes.”

AgingCertaintySerenityTranquilityPossibilitiesEquilibriumMiddle Age
Book:Passing On
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“The world is full of widows--several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage--forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience--everywhere, always--so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn't tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come--not so much to feel as to understand.”

LifeLossGriefMarriageMourningWidowsSelf PitySpousesLoss Of A Spouse
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.”

ChildhoodMemoryAdulthoodChilldren
Book:Moon Tiger
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“Early reading is serendipitous, and rightly so. Gloriously so. Libraries favor serendipity, invite it; the roaming along a shelf, eyeing an unfamiliar name, taking this down, then that--oh, who's this? Never heard of her--give her a go? That is where, and how, you learn affinity and rejection. You find out what you like by exploring what you do not.”

ReadingChanceChildhoodBooksLikesLibrariesSerendipityDislikes
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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