Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. Fitzgerald was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, for her novel The Bookshop; and won the Booker prize in 1979 for her work, Offshore.

Quotes

The Bookshop (1978)

• The frame of mind, however, is everything. Given that, one can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself.

Human Voices (1980)

• Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure, short of total abstention.

Innocence (1986)

• There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics.

• He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.

External links

• "Penelope Fitzgerald", by Harriet Harvey-Wood, The Guardian, May 3, 2000.
• "How did she do it?", Julian Barnes, The Guardian, July 26, 2008
• "The Unknown Penelope Fitzgerald", Edmund Gordon,TLS, June 30, 2010
• "Fitzgerald, Penelope", Britannica Student Encyclopedia (2006).
• Meet the Writers: Penelope Fitzgerald, Barnes and Noble.
• penelope&query-join=and Penelope Fitzgerald Collection, Additional Papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• "Penelope Fitzgerald: Dedicated to Her Life and Work"