194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.

Helen racked her brains. Advice? Surely they needed advice? Of course they needed advice; she reviewed, in a flash, the whole unsatisfactory condition of Greystones, of her state of mind, of life itself. How can we stop the drain flooding whenever it rains? Why do I have to feel guilty because my mother has died? How can I achieve a comforting complacency?

Don't you ever realise," said Helen, "that the way we live is unlike the way other people live?" "On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

A great library is anything and everything. It is not for its current custodians to judge what the future will find to be of importance, and it is this eclecticism that gives it the mystique, that is the wonder of it.

This is the satisfaction of a successful work of fiction--the internal coherence that reality does not have. Life as lived is disordered, undirected, and at the mercy of contingent events.

Helen recognised that she, and Edward, and Dorothy herself, for that matter, were not as others are when it came to possession. She seldom wanted anything. Edward was the same. Her mother had hated spending money, not out of parsimony but laziness. Whatever it was in the make-up of most people that responds to the sight of goods for sale had been left out, in their case.

What she was retreating from was any profundity of feeling and therefore any commitment more intense than light church attendance and an interest in roses.... History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out.