“ But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we ca… Penelope Lively
“ It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd. Penelope Lively
“ The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss. Penelope Lively
“ I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a g… Penelope Lively
“ The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. T… Penelope Lively
“ The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system. Penelope Lively
“ Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there e… Penelope Lively
“ Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives. Penelope Lively
“ Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business. Penelope Lively
“ The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight. Penelope Lively
“ We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum insid… Penelope Lively
“ I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names. Penelope Lively
“ 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 been enough… Penelope Lively
