Helen, marvelling at Joyce's capacity for self-protection, often wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with order, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked the way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.
Tags: readers, order, librarians, books, arrangement

Other Quotes by "Penelope Lively"

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Tags: constantly, make, choices
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Tags: present, past, power, time
All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.
Tags: new, go, me, myself
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Tags: archaeology, get, i-can, past
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
Tags: just, said, want, like
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