Penelope Lively Quotes

Literature has a lot to answer for, where concepts of the countryside are concerned.

All habits are geared towards the linear, the sequential, but memory refuses such orderliness.

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a handful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

Wars are fought by children—conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.

One never, of course, knows what people in portraits are thinking.

Since then, I have just read and read – but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.