“Can I be of help?′ Big Cat asked. ‘I want to see the world.’ Little Fish said. ‘The world is beautiful here, really beautiful,’ Big Cat said. ‘The flowers... the trees... the ocean just over the hill.”
“This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave.”
“One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”
Henry always felt out of step with the world around him. When everyone looked up, he looked down. If he thought it was going to be a sunny day, it usually rained.
“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.”
“Everything must, in one way or another, go. One does what one is wound to do. It is expected of me that I walk up and down in front of my house; it is expected of you that you drink tea. And it is expected of this young mouse that he go out into the world with his father and dance in a circle.”
″‘Will you be my mama?’ said the child, ‘and will you sing to me all the time? And can we all stay here together and live in the beautiful house where the party is and not go out into the world?‘”
“Penelope Lively takes us to a time in our lives when the world was bright and wide; when every nook, cranny and hole can yield buried treasure and unfettered ...
“The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.”
“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
“They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”