top of page
Exlpore more Time quotes

"Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."

"The value of time is immeasurable."

"Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever."

"Worrying about what happened on Monday, or, what might happen on Wednesday, is at the expense of one's Tuesday."

"Don't equate effective living to being busy."

"People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground."

"Time passes..and a billion lives are affected in ways we'll never know."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively

"The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."

"Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm."
bottom of page