194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.