Passing On Quotes

“People are always meaning well,' said Edward. 'That's often the trouble.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Don't you ever realise," said Helen, "that the way we live is unlike the way other people live?"

"On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“There's this piece of contemporary mythology that the forties are the best time of your life. A load of cock, so far as I'm concerned.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Other people's houses always intrigued her by the contrast they offered to Greystones; she would see suddenly -- with detached interest and quite without envy or criticism -- the extent to which other people's preoccupations differed from her own.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Anyone would think we were some kind of free education service,' grumbled Joyce, having disposed of the child and returned to her central eyrie.

'That's just what we are,' said Helen.

Joyce shot her a look in which surprise and indignation were nicely fused.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don't want anyone to know or care.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Feelings also may be inescapable, Edward learned, but there are ways of cheating them. Of diverting them. Of hiding from them. Your own howls can be drowned out by the howls of the rest of the world, if you set about it properly. If you are naturally self-deprecating, and exceptionally under-endowed with egotism, the process comes almost naturally. Eventually you are exercised only about the atrocities around. Or so it can seem.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“As Helen, Edward and Louise grew up they had come to recognise their mother's outlook for what it was. They realised with discomfort that she was not so much egotistical as fettered – trapped within a perpetual adolescence. She moved for ever within a landscape whose only point of reference was herself.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“...And you have to remember that Edward grew up at a time when ... when homosexuality was illegal. Quite apart from being socially unacceptable--at least in the circles we moved in."

"That's ridiculous. You can't help it if you're gay."

"Reasonable people have always thought that.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“He realised that he was probably unwell in some way, but it did not seem to be a state of ill health about which anything could be done; you could not go to the doctor and say that you didn't know what season it was.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“All my life, she thought, I have let things pass me by.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“It was not so much that he had anything against people in general, more that he saw no purpose in deliberately setting up occasions on which you stood around trying to think of something to say. Moreover, the whole process was self-perpetuating; the guest became the host in an act of social revenge and thus it was on for ever. The only sensible course was never to start it in the first place.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“He did not want to be young again -- that time had had particular and transcendent horrors -- but the thought of being any older filled him with panic. He could not imagine finding tranquility of soul in old age; if he could only be allowed to mark time for a while all might yet be well, one might suddenly achieve equilibrium, certainty, serenity. There would still be possibilities. Hopes.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“I suppose the difficulty about us is that so far as money and possessions are concerned, we're at a more primitive stage than the rest. We're not interested in surplus. It's like being aborigines or North American Indians after the colonists have arrived. When everyone else is busy accumulating, they get bothered about anyone who is quite happy with a modest sufficiency.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“The problem about us,' said Helen, 'is that we've never felt the same way about money as most other people seem to.'

'I've never thought of it as a problem.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“It is as though I were adrift, untethered. I don't think of her much, no more than I ever did, but something terrible is going on. At moments all is well, and then at others I think that I am flying apart.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Helen read a great deal. The feel of a book in her hands was an ancient solace -- not, originally, because of what lay between the covers but as a screen, a defence, a shield.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Helen, marvelling at Joyce's capacity for self-protection, often wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with order, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked the way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Helen racked her brains. Advice? Surely they needed advice? Of course they needed advice; she reviewed, in a flash, the whole unsatisfactory condition of Greystones, of her state of mind, of life itself. How can we stop the drain flooding whenever it rains? Why do I have to feel guilty because my mother has died? How can I achieve a comforting complacency?”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“At the time, fatal steps are seldom recognised as such. There had been, for so long, the presumption that at any moment something would crop up to provoke change.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Helen recognised that she, and Edward, and Dorothy herself, for that matter, were not as others are when it came to possession. She seldom wanted anything. Edward was the same. Her mother had hated spending money, not out of parsimony but laziness. Whatever it was in the make-up of most people that responds to the sight of goods for sale had been left out, in their case.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“She patted Edward's arm. 'You'd be uncomfortable being comfortable, wouldn't you?”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On