"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..."
- Penelope Lively
"It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd."
"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 e..."
"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."
"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum insid..."
"But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we ca..."
"The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system."
"The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight."
"The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. T..."
"So now we are young still but a better sort of young."