Penelope Lively Quotes

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.

I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for…

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.