Life & Wisdom Quote by Penelope Lively

There’s a sly double-loyalty embedded here: Lively drops the doctrine, keeps the music. Calling herself “now an agnostic” establishes intellectual distance from belief, but the sentence swivels quickly toward gratitude, as if to pre-empt the knee-jerk modern assumption that leaving religion requires scorning it. The King James Bible isn’t invoked as theology; it’s invoked as a formative aesthetic environment, a linguistic weather system you grow up inside.

“Grew up on” is doing quiet cultural work. It frames scripture like a staple diet: everyday, unchosen, absorbed before you have the vocabulary to argue back. That phrasing also strips away piety and replaces it with biography, which is where Lively’s fiction lives - in the way memory and inheritance shape the self. Her “eternally grateful” is a neat, almost mischievous echo of religious diction (“eternal”) used to praise something she no longer believes in. The irony is gentle, not barbed: she’s not mocking faith, she’s acknowledging its residual gifts.

Context matters because for a British writer of her generation, the King James was less a niche religious text than a shared cultural infrastructure - cadences that leak into English prose, idioms that seed themselves in thought. Lively’s intent is to claim that inheritance can be valuable without being binding. The subtext: you can outgrow belief and still admit the formation mattered - not as truth, but as training in rhythm, metaphor, moral complexity, and the sheer sonics of English.