Penelope Lively Quotes

We've accumulated a lot of things over the years and many things from our grandmother. Hopefully it'll be all right. I really don't want to cry, but I can't help it.

I bought a house in England in 1990, shortly after my father died, hoping to come home to England and spend time with my family.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

The most important thing you leave behind is the stuff that turns into treasures when children find it

Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really, people belong to them.

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

To be honest, I think I'd become a bit selfish with memories of my father. I wanted to hug them close to me.

People look to you to replace a part in their lives that they can't get back. You can't get the past back, you can't do it. We've all tried.

The hurricane flooded me out of a lot of memorabilia, but it can't flood out the memories.

My brother Mark still lives in the house we grew up in.

This house was our dream-the gardens, the study, even the swimming pool. Even though I can't see John when I wake up in the morning, I can always feel him here with me.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

Learning of my father's passing at age 55 not only shattered the world, far from home, that had become my reality, but catapulted my childhood and relationship with family - which had felt like another lifetime - into the present.

My daddy had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch and showed him how Daddy used to use it.

I don't think about Yauch in the form of his death. I think about him in the form of his life. He was like my closest older brother. There's just so much that we lived through together.

When a relationship ends, all you can do is play in your head everything that happened between you.

Nobody will ever top Owen Hart. Owen was like a brother to me. I loved him so much because he made me laugh harder than anyone's made me laugh in my life.

My parents sold my childhood home, and I literally was 35 years old, but I cried for, like, two and a half weeks. Like, openly wailed.

A handsome period of my childhood was spent at our house in Tollygunge.

When I was little, I would sing all around the house.

My mother was really amazing and left me with a whole lot of treasures. I miss her terribly.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

You spend a good part of your adult life acquiring things: building a home, filling it with objects that please your eye and make you feel comfortable. Then you spend the last part of your life trying to figure out how to get rid of it all.

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.