Top 100 Penelope Lively Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.”

— Penelope Lively

52. “You plot, daily. Face down circumstance. Measure out your life with... not coffee spoons – pills. Line them up with breakfast, lunch, supper. Never mind mermaids, and lilacs in bloom, and all that stuff. He hadn’t a clue.”

— Penelope Lively

53. “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, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.”

— Penelope Lively

54. “I didn’t think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.”

— Penelope Lively

55. “When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine – ours – is the only evidence.”

— Penelope Lively

56. “You learn a lot, writing fiction.”

— Penelope Lively

57. “I have no idea where I am going, she thought, but I have begun.”

— Penelope Lively

58. “I’m now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I’m eternally grateful for.”

— Penelope Lively

59. “History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.”

— Penelope Lively

60. “I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.”

— Penelope Lively

61. “If people don’t read, that’s their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.”

— Penelope Lively

62. “There’s this piece of contemporary mythology that the forties are the best time of your life. A load of cock, so far as I’m concerned.”

— Penelope Lively

63. “Any book represents effort, struggle, work – I know, I write them myself – every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal.”

— Penelope Lively

64. “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.”

— Penelope Lively

65. “He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.”

— Penelope Lively

66. “Time and the universe lie around in our minds. We are sleeping histories of the world.”

— Penelope Lively

67. “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.”

— Penelope Lively

68. “And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford.”

— Penelope Lively

69. “His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls...”

— Penelope Lively

70. “She’s been surprised by weather, these last weeks. By its versatility and by the grandeur of its effects... A primitive and elemental form of time untamed by Greenwich or the Gregorian calendar.”

— Penelope Lively

71. “The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.”

— Penelope Lively

72. “Equally, we require a collective past – hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.”

— Penelope Lively

73. “I’m not an historian and I’m not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who’s walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.”

— Penelope Lively

74. “Since then, the e-book. I don’t care to read on an e-reader myself, though I would under certain circumstances – when traveling, or if in the hospital – and I get bored by the exclusive defense of either paper or screen. Future readers will require both, I assume, but I can’t imagine that many would wish to own a personal library that consisted of the Kindle on the coffee table, rather than some shelves of books, with all their eloquence about where we have been and who we are.”

— Penelope Lively

75. “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

76. “All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved – probably too starved to go on writing myself.”

— Penelope Lively

77. “I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it’s not.”

— Penelope Lively

78. “When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.”

— Penelope Lively

79. “The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.”

— Penelope Lively

80. “I’ve grown old with this century; there’s not much left of either of us.”

— Penelope Lively

81. “Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling – I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn’t known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug.”

— Penelope Lively

82. “I didn’t want it to be a book that made pronouncements.”

— Penelope Lively

83. “For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.”

— Penelope Lively

84. “The trouble with all this, she said to him, is that it leaves so much out.”

— Penelope Lively

85. “How can you not be involved? These are your times, your world, even if those events are on the other side of it. And as for the narrative – you are a part of that, for better or for worse, whether the grey inexorable economic inevitabilities – recessions and recoveries and having less money or more – or the grand perilous global story.”

— Penelope Lively

86. “I rather like getting away from fiction.”

— Penelope Lively

87. “I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.”

— Penelope Lively

88. “Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown.”

— Penelope Lively

89. “There’s a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.”

— Penelope Lively

90. “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.”

— Penelope Lively

91. “Is nausea always a manifestation of grief? Who am I to know? I have never been thus before. 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

92. “It is as though I were adrift, untethered. I don’t think of her much, no more than I ever did, but something terrible is going on. At moments all is well, and then at others I think that I am flying apart.”

— Penelope Lively

93. “He is not exactly fat, but he has the tight, glossy look of a man whose skin fits a little too well.”

— Penelope Lively

94. “I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.”

— Penelope Lively

95. “Wars have little to do with justice. Or valour or sacrifice or the other things traditionally associated with them. That’s one thing I hadn’t quite realised. War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It’s had a disgracefully good press.”

— Penelope Lively

96. “Don’t think about it. However it was it is over now. However it was or whereever it was. He is not lying there any more. He is nowhere now. Nowhere at all. Don’t think about it.”

— Penelope Lively

97. “I control the world so long as I can name it.”

— Penelope Lively

98. “When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy. I’d rather like to go back to fantasising.”

— Penelope Lively

99. “And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don’t want anyone to know or care.”

— Penelope Lively

100. “And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.”

— Penelope Lively