Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

Penelope Lively
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi) - Eve Ensler

  2. Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance. - Yoko Ono

  3. Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in. - Lynsay Sands

  4. It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also... - Mitch Albom

  5. A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell... - Douglas Coupland

More Quotes By Penelope Lively
  1. I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine — a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we...

  2. It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

  3. Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to...

  4. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.

  5. We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of whom...

Related Topics