The Photograph Quotes

“My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.”
― Penelope Lively, The Photograph

“Behind and byond her looks,her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it, back then, he thought. All you saw was her face.”
― Penelope Lively, The Photograph

“A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery”
― Penelope Lively, The Photograph

“His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....”
― Penelope Lively, The Photograph

“Time is the necessary connection between events. Time is the device that prevents everything from happening at once. Pioneering archaeology went all-out for the establishment of chronology, and no wonder.”
― Penelope Lively, The Photograph

“Odd things happen to time, as you get older. Time compacts. Where once it was elastic, and ten years seemed an eternity, it has become shrunken, wizened—nothing is all that long ago.”
― Penelope Lively, The Photograph