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"We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance."
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Exlpore more Choice quotes
"It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it."
"I don't make people smoke pot or meth, snort coke, put pills or tabs in their mouths or shoot themselves up with heroin. I just transport the stuff."
"Life happens because of choices we make, if you want a better outcome; think before you create."
"Times goes by your choice, if you make your days wonderful the days will go fast... and interesting and memorable.... If you do it in boring way they will go like watching a film which doesn't have something to make you get interested without games, crimes, horror, thriller, romance and every single other genre which you think without it the film is awful... but not only genre, but genres!"
"Seemingly insignificant choices are like seemingly trivial seeds. Once planted, they root and grow and spread into something tremendous. Imagine the prickly weeds some choices amount to over time and be careful not to plant them."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively
"I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction."
"The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction."
"I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one."
"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."
"I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement."
"I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years."
"All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself."
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