Penelope Lively Quotes

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.

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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…

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It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

2758

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

2778

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.

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The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.

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