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Penelope Lively Biography

Penelope Lively

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively (born Penelope Margaret Low, 17 March 1933) is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).

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Penelope Lively Quotes

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Away, Fiction, Get Away, Like

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Identity, Needs, Past, Sense

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Book, Reading, People, Read, Affliction, Habit

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Writing, Social, Century, Somebody, Walked, Wanting

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

Block, Grief, Eye, Eyes, Felt, Claudia

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

Children, Thinking, Might, Say, Think

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

Age, Eye, Eyes, Old, Realise, Science

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

Act, Links, People, Work

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Writing, Fiction, Mixtures, Know, Strange

There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.

Fashion, Believe, People, Term, Moment

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

Country, Family, Grandmother, Grandmothers, Home, House

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

Except, Forever, Lying, Standing, Year, Years

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Choices, Constantly, Foiled, Happenstance, Make

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, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.

Spring, Childhood, Church, Rolling, Pharisee, Babylon

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

Dawn, Moments, Innocent, Arrivals, History, Accelerates

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

Logic, Message, Messages, Stuff

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

Choice, Choices, Contingency, Everything Happens For A Reason, Happens

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

Broken, Day, Like, Longer, Self, Sweet

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

Memories, Way, Linear, Memory, Ambivalence

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

Appearance, Beautiful, Direct, Life, Way, Woman

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