Quotes from Penelope Lively

Don't think about it. However it was it is over now. However it was or whereever it was. He is not lying there any more. He is nowhere now. Nowhere at all. Don't think about it.

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.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

I have learned to be suspicious of memory--my own, anyone's--but to accord it considerable respect. Whether accurate or not, it can subvert a life.

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

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.

Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.

And long gone are the days when a paperback meant a Penguin, pure and simple, let alone when a paperback publisher could confidently market a product with no image at all on the cover - just the title and the author's name, emphatically lettered. Beautiful.

Life is a mess - a random muddle. Which is exactly why one is drawn to improving on it.

Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.

Matt only knew that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.

It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?

Rose said: 'Some people would be needing their spare glasses, or that blue cardigan. You need a book. Of course.' 'A deficiency?'said Charlotte meekly. 'Not at all. The need defines you, that's all.

Is nausea always a manifestation of grief? Who am I to know? I have never been thus before. Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

He is not exactly fat, but he has the tight, glossy look of a man whose skin fits a little too well.

When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy. I'd rather like to go back to fantasising.

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.

And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don't want anyone to know or care.

And when you and I talk about history we don't mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

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.

I control the world so long as I can name it.

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.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

Any book represents effort, struggle, work--I know, I write them myself--every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal.