Quotessence
Home / Authors / Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllLifeGriefMourningLossAgingChangeBooksDeathHistoryReadingTimeBereavementChildhoodMemoryOld AgeLearningLibrariesMemoriesPeopleRelationships

Famous Penelope Lively Quotes

“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.”

LifeFactsTruthPastExistenceHistoryEventsInterpretation
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
Create image

“...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
Create image

“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,' 'Claudia, you must not answer back like that.' Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested.”

TruthHistoryArgumentDebateDissensionHistorians
Book:Moon Tiger
Create image

“To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.”

PastTimeHistoryHeritageHeritage Industry
Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
Create image