{"author":"Penelope Lively","author_id":"Penelope+Lively","total_quotes":16,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["gifts","possession","ties"],"id":13877,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"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 inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["language","words"],"id":55702,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"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 ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["children","dragons"],"id":160429,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["work"],"id":166783,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"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 time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for….","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["relationships"],"id":172208,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"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 grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["photo","photographs","photography","temporality"],"id":189632,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["aging"],"id":197003,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"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.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["memories","past"],"id":201714,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["loss","think","social change "],"id":250473,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"},{"text":"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.","author":"Penelope Lively","tags":["language","literature","world"],"id":268115,"author_id":"Penelope+Lively"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":16,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}