"Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are"
About this Quote
The line reads like a gentle rebuke to the speed-dating version of intimacy: the idea that you can skim a person the way you skim a headline. Penelope Lively, a novelist obsessed with memory and the sediment of lived experience, makes “getting to know” sound less like collecting facts and more like practicing a discipline. The key word is curiosity. Not evaluation, not diagnosis, not even empathy in its performative, social-media-friendly form. Curiosity is active; it requires you to keep looking when the easy story runs out.
The phrasing quietly splices time into identity. “Where they have come from” isn’t just geography; it’s history, class, family mythologies, private griefs, the accidents that calcify into character. Lively’s fiction often turns on how the past leaks into the present, how people are never simply “who they are” in a clean, self-authored way. By pairing origin with identity, she suggests that personhood is layered, and any attempt to know someone that skips the earlier layers will default to stereotype.
There’s also an ethical subtext: to be curious about another life is to grant it complexity. In a culture that flattens people into types (the difficult coworker, the weird neighbor, the ex), curiosity is a refusal to reduce. It implies humility, too; you don’t approach another person as a problem to solve but as a narrative you haven’t earned the right to summarize yet.
The phrasing quietly splices time into identity. “Where they have come from” isn’t just geography; it’s history, class, family mythologies, private griefs, the accidents that calcify into character. Lively’s fiction often turns on how the past leaks into the present, how people are never simply “who they are” in a clean, self-authored way. By pairing origin with identity, she suggests that personhood is layered, and any attempt to know someone that skips the earlier layers will default to stereotype.
There’s also an ethical subtext: to be curious about another life is to grant it complexity. In a culture that flattens people into types (the difficult coworker, the weird neighbor, the ex), curiosity is a refusal to reduce. It implies humility, too; you don’t approach another person as a problem to solve but as a narrative you haven’t earned the right to summarize yet.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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