Top 100 Penelope Lively Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.”

— Penelope Lively

2. “Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.”

— Penelope Lively

3. “People die, but money never does.”

— Penelope Lively

4. “We all need a past – that’s where our sense of identity comes from.”

— Penelope Lively

5. “And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.”

— Penelope Lively

6. “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

7. “If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.”

— Penelope Lively

8. “Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.”

— Penelope Lively

9. “We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.”

— Penelope Lively

10. “The regrets of old age are polarized: you wish you had not done certain things – behaved thus, responded like that – and you wish you had seized more of the day, been greedier, packed more in.”

— Penelope Lively

11. “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

12. “It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.”

— Penelope Lively

13. “The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.”

— Penelope Lively

14. “I didn’t write anything until I was well over 30.”

— Penelope Lively

15. “I’m not an historian but I can get interested-obsessively interested-with any aspect of the past, whether it’s palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.”

— Penelope Lively

16. “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

17. “People are always meaning well,′ said Edward. ‘That’s often the trouble.”

— Penelope Lively

18. “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

19. “The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.”

— Penelope Lively

20. “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

21. “It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.”

— Penelope Lively

22. “But who knows their own child? You know bits – certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.”

— Penelope Lively

23. “Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.”

— Penelope Lively

24. “Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.”

— Penelope Lively

25. “Life is a mess – a random muddle. Which is exactly why one is drawn to improving on it.”

— Penelope Lively

26. “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.”

— Penelope Lively

27. “In the frozen stone of the cathedrals of Europe there co-exist the Apostles, Christ and Mary, lambs, fish, gryphons, dragons, sea-serpents and the faces of men with leaves for hair. I approve of that liberality of mind.”

— Penelope Lively

28. “I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.”

— Penelope Lively

29. “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

30. “We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.”

— Penelope Lively

31. “Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.”

— Penelope Lively

32. “And long gone are the days when a paperback meant a Penguin, pure and simple, let alone when a paperback publisher could confidently market a product with no image at all on the cover – just the title and the author’s name, emphatically lettered. Beautiful.”

— Penelope Lively

33. “All history, of course, is the history of wars.”

— Penelope Lively

34. “In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.”

— Penelope Lively

35. “Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.”

— Penelope Lively

36. “She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.”

— Penelope Lively

37. “I want to live somewhere where it rains a lot and things grow furiously. I want to see the fruits of the earth multiply and all that sort of thing. I want to make provision for the future. I want to lay up riches on earth since I don’t believe in heaven. Not material riches – I want green fields and fat cows and oak trees.”

— Penelope Lively

38. “I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years – first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.”

— Penelope Lively

39. “Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.”

— Penelope Lively

40. “You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not – life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.”

— Penelope Lively

41. “There’s a fearful term that’s in fashion at the moment – closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.”

— Penelope Lively

42. “A great library is anything and everything. It is not for its current custodians to judge what the future will find to be of importance, and it is this eclecticism that gives it the mystique, that is the wonder of it.”

— Penelope Lively

43. “A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery.”

— Penelope Lively

44. “One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I’d have liked to know the outcome.”

— Penelope Lively

45. “Thinks that it is a poor sort of life that has not known expectation, the pleasure of savoring ahead. So enjoy it while you have it, he tells himself.”

— Penelope Lively

46. “We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.”

— Penelope Lively

47. “Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.”

— Penelope Lively

48. “I have learned to be suspicious of memory – my own, anyone’s – but to accord it considerable respect. Whether accurate or not, it can subvert a life.”

— Penelope Lively

49. “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.”

— Penelope Lively

50. “The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.”

— Penelope Lively