Penelope Lively Quotes

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Living here in California, I think one of the scariest things about California is the fact that it is rewriting its script and changing constantly and so many people don't know who they will be and who they will be with a year from now.

Nothing is forever except change.

You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way.

Life to me is defined by uncertainty. Uncertainty is the state in which we live, and there is no way to outfox it.

If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.

The future is unpredictable.

Nothing ever stays the same for very long in my life.

Ambiguity is our permanent state, isn't it? We don't like it being so. Most of us crave order and routine, and yet yawning before us is our future, as frightening as it is thrilling.

That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is; the waves fold over each other; they are in love with themselves; sleeping in their own skin; and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.

We are always in transition.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

Nothing lasts forever, and no one can predict what will happen to me in the near or distant future.

Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it

There's nothing I know for sure, because I know for sure that things change.

Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

The hardest part of change is going through the unknown.

Everything is going to change.

I think ... that things are a little bit up for grabs right now.

It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.

He is less likely to be mistaken who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world than he who regards them as firm and stable.