Penelope Lively Quotes

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

History is a battleground... but it has always been the case. Remembering is a radical act. Choosing what is important and what belongs in the overstuffed metaphorical dustbin of history is of vital importance.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history.

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

History is always changing.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is all we know.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.