194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

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

I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for…

How many men have asked you to marry them?' 'Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

It was not so much that he had anything against people in general, more that he saw no purpose in deliberately setting up occasions on which you stood around trying to think of something to say. Moreover, the whole process was self-perpetuating; the guest became the host in an act of social revenge and thus it was on for ever. The only sensible course was never to start it in the first place.

People are always meaning well,' said Edward. 'That's often the trouble.

He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us. Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now.