Penelope Lively

“Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.”

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

“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,' 'Claudia, you must not answer back like that.' Argument,...”

“In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.”

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

“I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not b...”

“How many men have asked you to marry them?' 'Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.”

“And this is the most provocative situation, is it not? It invites abuse, manipulation, tyranny, subjection. A person is supposed to accommodate herself--himself--absolutely to another person...”

“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...”

“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 memo...”

“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 supp...”

“...collective memory is unevenly distributed: some people have a rich and deep resource, for others it is minimal. A matter of education, and also of inclination. But however minimal, howeve...”

“For some of us a war was being fought; there must have been many who had no idea what this war was, whose it was or why it was. Like some theatrical lion it roared off-stage while the actors...”

“It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.”

“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...”

“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, b...”

“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.”

“Anyone would think we were some kind of free education service,' grumbled Joyce, having disposed of the child and returned to her central eyrie. 'That's just what we are,' said Helen. Joyce...”

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

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