The Road to Lichfield Quotes

“The trouble with all this, she said to him, is that it leaves so much out.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“She said to Don, ‘Did you ring on Thursday night?’ ‘No. Why?’ ‘Just I went out for a bit – I thought I might have missed you.’ ‘It’s fifteen pence now for three minutes, you know, to Lichfield,’ Don said. ‘No point unless there’s something particular to say.’ Quite. ‘That’s all right then,’ she said. ‘So long as I didn’t miss you, that’s all.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“Leave the wretched crossword, she said, in the hotel bar, talk to me. Have you enjoyed today? We should do this more often. And Don, folding the newspaper (but right side out, she saw, ready for later) said, yes, very nice, I daresay we should, what about the summer, then? Scotland, isn’t it, we fixed on? Oh, Scotland, she said, I didn’t mean that, that’s different. Scotland’s the statutory two weeks holiday, so we’ve got something to talk to people about in the autumn. I meant days like this, she said, just for us, just for you and me”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“Later, eating in the kitchen, she said to Don, ‘We could go off for the weekend. Why don’t we? First time we’ve been on our own for God knows how long.’ ‘Go where?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere. The Cotswolds. Remember Broadway? Walk, and look at things. Stay in a nice hotel. Why shouldn’t we? Please let’s.’ ‘Why, particularly?’ ‘No reason. Just it would be nice. I’ll ring somewhere up, shall I – book us in? ’ ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘If you want to.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“She clasped her hands behind her head and stared into the darkness of the room, beginning the slow re-adjustment of the past, roaming to and fro across the years, without regard to chronology, sifting through a jumble of events and occasions. What I thought was thus, was otherwise. Things that appeared so, were not.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“I thought,’ said Sandra, ‘you were a preservationist.’ ‘Up to a point. Well, yes, naturally I am. But if you take age as a virtue in itself – if you sanctify the past just for its own sake …”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“Lichfield created itself in her head; her father in the white embrace of those hospital pillows, the empty house, the patch of sunlight shifting around his study, that stubborn rose root, its years of growth driving it deep down into the ground. And, accompanying these images, there came what seemed the most unaccountable, the most perverse sense of well-being, of undefined expectation, as in childhood there lay off-stage the promise of Christmas, of birthdays, of a treat.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“Lowry and Augustus John),”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“Denied the need to work by her husband's income, she pursued occupation. Hers was the stocky, tireless physique of a peasant woman bowed over a cornfield in some nineteenth century painting; transposed into her large modern house in this tranquil commuterland, she seemed to dart hither and thither with the undirected pent-up energy of a clockwork toy. A prettier woman would have taken up adultery.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“And he walks away down the nave (or what passes for such) wondering how all this has come about, and what it might lead to. He tries to remember the name of that chap she used to bring home when she was an undergraduate – dark, garrulous young man. Why didn't she marry him? Anne is a talker, and not just a talker of nothings, and a thinker, he suspects, too – a lot more so than her brother, in fact – and old Don is as silent as the grave. You can always talk to yourself, of course. But it is better not to. It is a great deal better not to. Oh, Anne, he thinks, I could tell you a thing or two. But I can't. There isn't, unfortunately, much to be done at all.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield

“One of her friends, haunted by the warnings and admonitions of books on child psychology, had spent most of her time explaining and apologizing for her actions to her children. ‘So long as they know why one is doing what one is doing, and why one behaved as one did, then it must be all right,’ she would say, desperately. ‘Mustn't it, Anne?’ The children, bored, seethed around their feet. And presumably, in the end, digested their mother's behaviour as her particular flaw, as such flaws are digested and become, in the end, familiar things one could not do without. Like, she thought, mother's flights from decision; father's array of dislikes. It would have been entirely disconcerting, in the end, to find mother make up her mind lightly whether to shop in the morning or the afternoon, to have father announce an admiration for Picasso. In the end it is consistency you want in people, not perfection. Betrayal is to find them do what you would not have expected. Just that.”
― Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield