194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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