194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

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.

He realised that he was probably unwell in some way, but it did not seem to be a state of ill health about which anything could be done; you could not go to the doctor and say that you didn't know what season it was.

You were... Well, you were who you were.''We're all that,' says Claudia. 'It's something one has to overcome.

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.

The problem about us,' said Helen, 'is that we've never felt the same way about money as most other people seem to.''I've never thought of it as a problem.

I suppose the difficulty about us is that so far as money and possessions are concerned, we're at a more primitive stage than the rest. We're not interested in surplus. It's like being aborigines or North American Indians after the colonists have arrived. When everyone else is busy accumulating, they get bothered about anyone who is quite happy with a modest sufficiency.

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.

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.

At the time, fatal steps are seldom recognised as such. There had been, for so long, the presumption that at any moment something would crop up to provoke change.