Home > Author > Margot Livesey
1 " If someone tells you a lie, they're not telling you the truth, but they are telling you something. It just takes longer to figure out what. "
― Margot Livesey , The House on Fortune Street
2 " The pleasure of this kind of narrative is not that we think we are reading about the real world (although the story usually does map onto our world fairly closely), but rather that the wings of symmetry are unfolding around us; briefly we are on a planet where, as E.M. Forster says, there are no secrets and human behavior makes sense. I call this 'fiction. "
― Margot Livesey , The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing
3 " Running, I soon realized, was the best way to stay ahead of fear. "
― Margot Livesey , The Flight of Gemma Hardy
4 " As far as I'm concerned it's the other way round. We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free. "
― Margot Livesey , The Missing World
5 " so often my own emotions were hidden not only from other people but from myself. or perhaps it was the other way round: i was hiding from them. "
6 " She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2,or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls. "
7 " Once again I glimpsed the way in which departure ripped the veil from ordinary life, revealing things that were normally kept hidden. "
8 " loves was about the people who loved you "
9 " Since the accident, Jonathan had noticed, she held on to things, a doorframe, a chair, as it either she or the world needed steadying. "
10 " he said everyone had a book, or a writer, that was the key to their life "
11 " Dialogue is a wolf in sheep’s clothing—often pretending to be woolly and vague, actually all teeth and meaning. Even "
12 " All along, he'd been looking in the wrong direction, trying to make time stand still, to re-create the past, but everything in life taught the opposite. "
13 " She knew she oughtn't to scold but she couldn't bear such a hyperbole. People couldn't live without food and air or shelter and money. Romantic love was an extra, nice if it came along, but definitely superfluous to the main requirements of existence. "
14 " ...you can molest someone without touching them, without even saying anything. Just the inappropriate desire can be harmful. "
15 " ..he had found himself thinking that marriage was not merely an empty ritual. It was a plea for patience on the part of those involved, and for the mercy on the part of bystanders. "
16 " People are allowed to be boring, but everyone should be nice to Duncan. "
― Margot Livesey , The Boy in the Field
17 " If you didn’t talk, I began to realize, people assumed you couldn’t hear. "
― Margot Livesey
18 " Do you know,” he said, “that there are people who can’t go near high places not because they’re afraid of heights but because they feel such a lure to jump? "
19 " We are our own terra incognita, the country on maps where dragons lurk. "
20 " Men were strictly for pleasure and for experimenting with versions of the self. "
