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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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"She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless."
"Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me."
"I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed."
"Things come into your memory even when you don't want them to, that is because 'pratikraman dosh' is pending (mistake for which pratikraman was not done yet)."
"Few things are more deceptive than memories."
"It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all."
"Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's."
"Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far)."
"But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night."
"He trailed through hallways, ducking under arms no longer there, excusing himself as he pressed through conversations long since ended."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively
"I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children."
"The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss."
"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."
"I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past."
"It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it."
"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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