Penelope Lively Quotes

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

The past is what the past is.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Never, ever forget history.

The past is where its supposed to be.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

History takes time... History makes memory.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

I exist only in the past.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

We are tomorrow's past.