How It All Began QUOTES

2 " So now we are young still but a better sort of young. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

4 " Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

6 " She read to find out what it was like to be French or Russian in the nineteenth century, to be a rich New Yorker then, or a Midwestern pioneer. She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

8 " But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend - without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share and no one else could view it anyway. The past is out ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

10 " Perhaps there is always something in our head that is ready to learn. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

12 " You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

14 " And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

16 " When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

18 " She saw the shadows of her children, young again, playing on that tree. And now to be here with him. You cross your own path. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began

20 " Charlotte misses her books. Her familiar walls, lined with language. "

― Penelope Lively , How It All Began