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

“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