Time & Perspective Quote by Penelope Lively

“Collective past” sounds like a civic utility, not a dusty archive: something a society needs in order to function, argue, and keep itself coherent. Penelope Lively’s line is quietly barbed because it frames history less as discovery than as maintenance. We don’t just inherit the past; we curate it. The “hence” lands like a shrug at a familiar human habit: if identity is built from narrative, then the narrative will be edited, refreshed, and occasionally airbrushed.

Her phrasing does two things at once. “Require” suggests necessity, even dependence, turning historical memory into infrastructure. Then “endless reinterpretations” punctures any fantasy of a settled account. The word “endless” isn’t celebratory; it implies a treadmill. The past keeps getting dragged into the present’s spotlight, not because new facts always demand it, but because new needs do.

The subtext is about power. “Frequently to suit the perceptions of the present” is an elegant way of describing how each era recruits history as a witness for its own case: national myths that soothe anxiety, cultural canons that mirror current values, reckonings that reassign blame or belatedly grant dignity. Lively is not denying that reinterpretation can be moral progress; she’s warning that it is also opportunism with a respectable name.

Contextually, this sits in late-20th-century Britain’s long argument over memory: empire, war, class, heritage culture, the marketable past. Lively, a novelist attuned to time’s distortions, understands that history is never just what happened. It’s what we can bear to remember, and what we need to believe to keep moving.