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"I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence."
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"You can never leave a place unless you leave that place in your mind!"
"At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head."
"There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning."
"It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?"
"You walk and walk and walk and then you look at back and see your youth, so far away from you, so young, so curious, so hopeful, so breezy, so brave! To feel young in old age, remember your youth very often! Remind yourself frequently what you were once!"
"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."
"Memories rob us of the present."
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."
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