I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock. I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away. . Penelope Lively
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. - Marc Riboud
  2. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. - Dorothea Lange
  3. When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. - Aleksandar Hemon
  4. Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter. - Ansel Adams
  5. A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. - George Bernard Shaw
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...
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