Penelope Lively Quotes

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

At 86, I can easily look back to the last eight decades. Though memory often fails me now, so many images of the past are still clearly polished, and I can yet recall not just an abiding sense of place, but the keen smells, the sensory responses to the events of that past.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

Quite like old times,' the room says.

It's like I'm stuck in a time bubble. Memories keep coming back, and of course, memories are a huge part of literature and cinema, from "Stand by Me" to "Blade Runner."

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.