How It All Began Quotes

“Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“She read to find out what it was like to be French or Russian in the nineteenth century, to be a rich New Yorker then, or a Midwestern pioneer. She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend - without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share and no one else could view it anyway. The past is out ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“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.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Perhaps there is always something in our head that is ready to learn.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem. (...) She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“So now we are young still but a better sort of young.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind (...).”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“She saw the shadows of her children, young again, playing on that tree. And now to be here with him. You cross your own path.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Thinks that it is a poor sort of life that has not known expectation, the pleasure of savoring ahead. So enjoy it while you have it, he tells himself.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Rose said: 'Some people would be needing their spare glasses, or that blue cardigan. You need a book. Of course.'

'A deficiency?'said Charlotte meekly.

'Not at all. The need defines you, that's all.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Jennifer next door has brought her baby around to be shown off to Charlotte—sitting up now, the baby, cooing, smiling. The baby has no past, she lives from emotion to emotion, a sliding present—now I’m happy, now I’m not, now I’m hungry, now I’ll sleep. But she is learning: hot, cold, sweet, sour, nice, nasty. Her hands learn; her eyes learn; her brain learns. This is called experience, and there is a whole mountain of it to climb, she is on the foothills, striving away; presently she will indeed start to acquire a past, a fledgling past, something that teases in her head. She will have, in time, a yesterday—eventually, last month, last year.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“You give birth to them. You do not design them.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“One thing old age does is play tricks with time. Time”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“can make a few shrewd guesses, and it is not particularly alluring. You are on the edge of things now, clinging on to life’s outer rim. You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not—life has been lived but it is all still going on, in the mind, for better and for worse. But don’t imagine that anyone else wants to know about it; this narrative is personal, and mind you remember that. Even Rose can take only so much of that holiday we had at Mevagissey, and the birthday party when you dropped the cake. It is strange that for so many years your life ran parallel with hers, but she knows little of how yours was—and, indeed, her child’s eye view is opaque to you. What did she see and hear? She saw you and Tom, presumably, and that you were”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Run over, thought Charlotte. Knocked down by one of those manic cyclists. It dies hard, maternal anxiety. In fact, it doesn’t die at all. A life sentence. Well,”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Charlotte misses her books. Her familiar walls, lined with language.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“She asks to hold the baby, and enjoys the feel of her solid little body, new-minted, ready to grow and to go. She thinks of her own, which is time visible. She is walking proof that time is real, time exists, she is a demonstration of the power of time. And this is a story that will indeed end. But not for a while, she thinks, not for a while.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“When you prefer soup and the telly to a few hours with your lover there is something not quite right.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Twenty years ago. Since when both Jeremy and Stella have discovered her propensity to collapse. Disaster is not necessary; Stella can go into meltdown for no very evident reason. There was that major event a few years ago, requiring alarming medications and specialist treatment. She is basically vulnerable, said the sister, staring hard at Jeremy. Stella herself admits as much. I just don’t know what happens, she says—mystified, mortified—I don’t seem able to hang on. You will need to watch her, Gill orders Jeremy—the responsible older sister; no stress, no shocks.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began