Penelope Lively Quotes
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Quotes to Explore
-
I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted.
-
You can never plan the future by the past.
-
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
-
Many past products advertised in old publications can be profitably promoted all over again. Sometimes, just by giving them a new twist or modern application, you'll hit a real winner.
-
In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.
-
To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
-
In the past, two colleagues died each season. It was generally accepted this could happen.
-
I never felt the need to introduce all the obstacles in my past when I say, 'Hello, my name is Nate.' But at the same time, I've never hidden from it.
-
I'm really obsessed with the past.
-
In the past, TSR and now Wizards of the Coast have asked me to do game stats for my characters, and I'm never comfortable doing that. It's all relative after all.
-
For a movie, you have to make sure the lyrics are consistent with the rhythm that is given to you. But, at times, during the song's recording, you find out that your words are not appropriate for the track, and so you have to change them.
-
The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.
-
People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.
-
Elvis was just like a big old kid. It was like he never got past 19, I don't think, in a lotta ways.
-
We Muslims in the West, like Jews before us, grapple with the same issues that Jews of the past did: integration or isolation, tradition or reform, intermarriage or intra-marriage.
-
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
-
I have been immeasurably honored to serve the people of Maine for nearly 40 years in public office and for the past 17 years in the United States Senate. It was incredibly difficult to decide that I would not seek a fourth term in the Senate.
-
I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.
-
I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.
-
I see a face of love, Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong: Yea - art thou come again to me, great Song?' The face bent over him like silver night In long-remembered summers; that calm light Of days which shine in firmaments of thought, That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.
-
When we actively relate to people as rivals or enemies, we foster the false belief that we and they stand independent of one another. The truth is that we bind ourselves to them as if by an invisible tether, and we do so by our negative thoughts and feelings." "Who we are is who we are with others. How they seem to us is a revelation of ourselves.
-
An illusion which makes me happy is worth a verity which drags me to the ground.
-
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
