194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

There's this piece of contemporary mythology that the forties are the best time of your life. A load of cock, so far as I'm concerned.

He did not want to be young again -- that time had had particular and transcendent horrors -- but the thought of being any older filled him with panic. He could not imagine finding tranquility of soul in old age; if he could only be allowed to mark time for a while all might yet be well, one might suddenly achieve equilibrium, certainty, serenity. There would still be possibilities. Hopes.

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.

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.

When I was her age, thought Pauline, the options were confusing. They always are. Who'd be young? Everything wide open, which means that the not chosen is discarded. Junked.

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

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, trespasses and Babylon and covenant.... I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently -- it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable.

...her view of gender distinction was that men were a different breed from women, you deferred to them in some respects and recognized that they had special needs--cooked breakfast and somewhere to go and smoke.