Quotes from Penelope Lively

You think back. And often it seems more real than now. I mean, here I am, like this, but in my mind it's like I was different. Young, you see. You never really believe you're not anymore.

Leave it till the morning. We'll all feel stronger then.

What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

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.

Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.

I'm not sure that I believe in God.' 'Oh I do,' says Claudia. 'Who else could bugger things up so effectively?

Her face, suddenly, contorts. The lips pinch and tighten. A hand crawls across the sheet. Lisa says, 'Are you all right?' 'No, says Claudia. 'But who is?

Helen read a great deal. The feel of a book in her hands was an ancient solace -- not, originally, because of what lay between the covers but as a screen, a defence, a shield.

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.

Other people's houses always intrigued her by the contrast they offered to Greystones; she would see suddenly -- with detached interest and quite without envy or criticism -- the extent to which other people's preoccupations differed from her own.

The urge to garden transcends social circumstance, which accounts for the allotment movement, of which more later, and the floral energy of small front gardens up and down the land.

It is as though I were adrift, untethered. I don't think of her much, no more than I ever did, but something terrible is going on. At moments all is well, and then at others I think that I am flying apart.

Feelings also may be inescapable, Edward learned, but there are ways of cheating them. Of diverting them. Of hiding from them. Your own howls can be drowned out by the howls of the rest of the world, if you set about it properly. If you are naturally self-deprecating, and exceptionally under-endowed with egotism, the process comes almost naturally. Eventually you are exercised only about the atrocities around. Or so it can seem.

The cast is assembling; the plot thickens. Mother, Gordon, Sylvia. Jasper. Lisa. Mother will drop out before long, retiring gracefully and with minimum fuss after an illness in 1962. Others, as yet unnamed, will come and go. Some more than others; one above all. In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.

The problem about us,' said Helen, 'is that we've never felt the same way about money as most other people seem to.' 'I've never thought of it as a problem.

I suppose the difficulty about us is that so far as money and possessions are concerned, we're at a more primitive stage than the rest. We're not interested in surplus. It's like being aborigines or North American Indians after the colonists have arrived. When everyone else is busy accumulating, they get bothered about anyone who is quite happy with a modest sufficiency.

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.

Enough of Jasper. It should be clear by now how he fits into the scheme of things. Lover to begin with, sparring partner always, father of my child; our lives sometimes fusing, sometimes straying apart, always connected. I loved him once, but cannot remember how that felt.

The building appears to be locked still into the early nineteenth century (…) There is sits, ticked snug into the fields. It could have simply grown of its own accord, you feel - made from the very bones of this land. It is an emancipation of a time and a place. The truth is that World's End is suspended in this landscape like a space capsule (…)

Find something to do,' says Claudia. I can't, shouts Lisa, I can't I can't I can't I don't know where to find it I don't know where to look I want pink fingernails like yours I want to be you not me I want to make you look at me I want you to say Lisa how pretty you are.

Lowry and Augustus John)

When we are married - and we will be married, I know we will, I see the long years of our marriage ahead like a great spacious welcoming firelit room - when we are married we shall have a house in London because I want to show you off. I want to wave you around in pride. We'll have that - but we'll also have Porlock, or somewhere like Porlock because we're going to want to be alone, and work, and shut the door on people...

Denied the need to work by her husband's income, she pursued occupation. Hers was the stocky, tireless physique of a peasant woman bowed over a cornfield in some nineteenth century painting; transposed into her large modern house in this tranquil commuterland, she seemed to dart hither and thither with the undirected pent-up energy of a clockwork toy. A prettier woman would have taken up adultery.

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