Quotes from Penelope Lively

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

All my life, she thought, I have let things pass me by.

What I could offer Lisa was not the conventional haven of maternal love and concern but my mind and my energy. If she had not acquired these genetically then I was quite prepared to show her how to think and act. I was no good at kissing away tears or telling bedtime stories – any mother can do that: my uses were potentially far more significant.

He realised that he was probably unwell in some way, but it did not seem to be a state of ill health about which anything could be done; you could not go to the doctor and say that you didn't know what season it was.

Gardening has this embracing quality in that it colours the way you look at the world.

There are some supremely agreeable moments in life that are best savoured alone -- the first barefoot step into a cold sea, the reading of certain books, the revelation that it has snowed in the night, waking up on one's birthday... And others the full wonder of which can only be achieved if someone else is there to observe.

he started to talk about the Paleolithic, about cave art, about the way in which the term art is itself an anachronism since those who created these images could not have been doing so with any understanding of the concept of art as we know it.

I cannot write chronologically of Egypt. Ancient Egypt. So-called ancient Egypt. In my history of the world – this realistic kaleidoscopic history – Egypt will have its proper place as the complacent indestructible force that has perpetuated itself in the form of enough carved stone, painted plaster, papyri, granite, gold leaf, lapis lazulis, bits of pot and fragments of wood to fill the museums of thew world. Egypt is not then but now, conditioning the way we look at things.

Two books under my belt, some controversial journalism, a reputation for contentious provocative attention-seizing writing. I had something of a name. If feminism had been around then I'd have taken it up, I suppose; it would have needed me. As it was, I never felt its absence; being a woman seemed to me a valuable extra asset.

And you have to remember that Edward grew up at a time when ... when homosexuality was illegal. Quite apart from being socially unacceptable--at least in the circles we moved in. That's ridiculous. You can't help it if you're gay. Reasonable people have always thought that.

time marches on, as children grow and develop and mutate, as adults accommodate or fester or rejoice.

The blizzard of baffling and confusing instructions and information that falls upon every child everywhere assumes a Carrollian texture.

She asks to hold the baby, and enjoys the feel of her solid little body, new-minted, ready to grow and to go. She thinks of her own, which is time visible. She is walking proof that time is real, time exists, she is a demonstration of the power of time. And this is a story that will indeed end. But not for a while, she thinks, not for a while.

You were... Well, you were who you were.' 'We're all that,' says Claudia. 'It's something one has to overcome.

She patted Edward's arm. 'You'd be uncomfortable being comfortable, wouldn't you?

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.

At the time, fatal steps are seldom recognised as such. There had been, for so long, the presumption that at any moment something would crop up to provoke change.

Lisa does not think about possible outcomes because a a world in whcih Claudia is not cannot be imagined. Claudia simply is, ever has been and always will be.

We all act as hinges - fortuitous links between other people. I link Sylvia to Laszlo, Lisa to Laszlo; Gordon links me to Sylvia.

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?

Anthropomorphism is unavoidable, I am finding, in writing about gardening: weeds don't just grow, they grow with intent, they grow aggressively. Well, they do, as any gardener knows. They sneak in and swarm up when your back is turned.

So far as I am concerned the difference between men and women is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not. I actually prefer a daisy-sprinkled lawn; Jack, of course, wanted meticulous stripes.

Laszlo's histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe - languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it.

Helen, marvelling at Joyce's capacity for self-protection, often wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with order, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked the way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.