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Penelope Lively Quotes

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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.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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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.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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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.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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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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“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.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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