Penelope Lively Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.
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If it be not a sin, an open, flagrant violation of all the rules of justice and humanity, to hold these slaves in bondage, it is indeed folly to put ourselves to any trouble and expense in order to free them.
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My kids are free to do what ever they want. Because I only advise. I don't make them do anything.
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I rolled up my sleeves and said, 'I want to make a mark on this world.'
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A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.
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This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.
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I think the government must recognise that the wounds of conflict are even more grievous on the mind than the body, and indeed may even serve to fuel further conflict. Where conflict cannot be avoided, provision of adequate psychosocial services to prevent the adverse mental health consequences should take priority.
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Redheads were particularly persecuted during the European witch trials of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The colour was associated with the devil, and the pale skin which most redheads have was thought unnatural and deathly.
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I love the way girls in London dress; it's so different to the American 'blow-dry and immaculate grooming' thing.
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The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass destruction.
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The good romances are as good as anything.
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I got the role I loved the most at a point in my career when most women are being phased out.
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But the Wisdom of God, which is His only-begotten Son, being in all respects incapable of change or alteration, and every good quality in Him being essential, and such as cannot be changed and converted, His glory is therefore declared to be pure and sincere.
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Before I gave birth to Hope, I had a miscarriage. The pain was so enormous, I had to write myself out of it. I kept a diary and did not feel entirely complete until Hope was born.
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While we know gambling is part of the industry in Las Vegas, we're not going to make it all that easy for you to pick up a ticket, a gambling ticket, on your way into the arena.
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I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.
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Music changes so fast, and we're in a singles market.
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I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.
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I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience.
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It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.
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I didn't understand the Kindle's true value until I finished an e-book on the beach. In sixty seconds - and without benefit of pants - I had brand-new reading material at my fingertips.
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I relaxed my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put 'Ph.D.' after his name (I don't put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all - and not just because I don't have one).
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I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
