Life & Wisdom Quote by Penelope Lively

Lively’s line has the quiet sting of an adult looking back and refusing the cheap comfort of a single story. “Disconcerting” does a lot of work: it signals not tragedy, not triumph, but the low-grade unease of realizing that the plot of a life is neither authored nor random. It’s a “mix,” and the mix is what unsettles us. We want our biographies to read cleanly - either as moral fables (I chose well, so I arrived here) or as weather reports (it happened to me, so blame the storm). Lively denies both.

The pairing of “choice and contingency” is also a subtle critique of the modern obsession with agency. Choice is the word of self-help, meritocracy, and the CV; contingency is the word of history, class, accident, illness, timing - forces that don’t care about your intention. By placing them in the same sentence without ranking them, Lively suggests that responsibility and randomness are roommates, not rivals. You can steer and still be carried. You can make the “right” call and still land in the wrong decade, the wrong economy, the wrong body, the wrong relationship at the wrong moment.

As a novelist, Lively is alert to how narratives are built: we edit hindsight until it looks inevitable. The quote resists that editorial impulse. Its intent is almost ethical - a push toward humility about our successes, mercy about our failures, and a more honest account of what it means to live inside time, where the world keeps interrupting our plans.