194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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