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"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."
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Exlpore more Family quotes
"Sometimes we're so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up."
"Mothers care in volumes of tears and earnestness of prayers and a depth of emotion others cannot fathom."
"So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball."
"One of the strongest loves I've ever witnessed is the love a mother has for her child."
"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
"My father never was a famous guy, he was just a person which made a lot of mistakes. But the suicide wasn't the best path, the best choice it was a way which could be skipped by using something else, by doing something else.But the question is why did he do it?To make mad and crazy the daughter of his ladylove??"
"Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively
"There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history."
"I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence."
"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."
"I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not."
"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."
"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 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 and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are."
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