194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time – and central to the concerns of fiction.

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.

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.

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

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.

A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery.

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.

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

In the frozen stone of the cathedrals of Europe there co-exist the Apostles, Christ and Mary, lambs, fish, gryphons, dragons, sea-serpents and the faces of men with leaves for hair. I approve of that liberality of mind.