City of the Mind Quotes

“And so they ride through the city, father and child, seeing, each, a different place. Jane, with the liberation of childhood, without rationality or expectations, sees an anarchic landscape in which anything is possible and many things are provocative. She wrestles with language, scans advertisements, shop-signs, logos on vans and trucks. She pays professional attention to other children, in the way that animals are most sensitive to their own species. She searches out the things that tether her to a known world — a bus with a familiar destination, a hoarding that proclaims her favourite brand of chocolate, Volkswagen cars that are like her father’s. Hers is a heliocentric universe, and she is the sun. She is fettered by a child’s careless egotism, but freed from adult preconceptions. She does not know what to expect, and can therefore assess what she sees in its own terms. She does not interpret, and therefore can construct her own system of references. The Arabic script on the windows of the Bank of Kuwait becomes little dancing figures. The caryatids outside the church in Euston Road are ladies wearing bath towels with books on their heads. For her, the city is alternately mysterious and familiar, baffling and instructive. She tests her own capacities against the view from the window of the bus; she rhymes and puns, she counts, she classifies. She plays games with words and sounds, she flexes her imagination, she takes the place as she sees it and twists it to her own ends.”
― Penelope Lively, City of the Mind

“When I was a child they used to take us to this beach, and I would look and look at the sea, knowing that where I came from was somewhere out there. I saw it as an island. A small German island with my town, my house, my parents, exactly as I left it all." She stared across the table - dark intense eyes under a black fringe streaked with grey. " You don't have a map in your head as a child. Later, you have the globe - the seas and the shapes - and you can't ever get back to that emptiness, that mystery. Knowing that there are other places, but not knowing where they are, or how to get there.”
― Penelope Lively, City of the Mind

“The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time.”
― Penelope Lively, City of the Mind

“He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us. Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now.”
― Penelope Lively, City of the Mind