P. D. James Quotes

132 Sourced Quotes

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

P. D. James
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

P. D. James
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

P. D. James
Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong, sir. Perhaps He's just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope he burns in His own Hell.

P. D. James
Gabriel has a personality like a hexagon. People need touch only one side for an illusion of closeness.

P. D. James
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

P. D. James
His main problem was apparently whether to wear his belt above or below his paunch. Above was said to indicate optimism, below a sign of depression.

P. D. James
He was too reticent himself to have any stomach for the emotional prying which gives to many people the comforting illusion that they care.

P. D. James
He marveled anew at the infinite variety of marriage, that relationship at once so private and public, so hedged with convention and yet so anarchical.

P. D. James
Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

P. D. James
[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

P. D. James
The Man Penal settlement. Do you know whats happening there? The murders, the starvation, the complete breakdown of law and order.

P. D. James
Gossip…was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

P. D. James
Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

P. D. James
I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

P. D. James
If you decide to do without a personal god it's illogical to saddle yourself with a legacy of Judeo-Christian sin. That way you suffer the psychological consequences of guilt without the consolation of absolution.

P. D. James
There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardors of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsibility of any civilized and democratic country.

P. D. James
That's another aspect of the revolutionary struggle, getting to know people's decencies and using them against them.

P. D. James
For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

P. D. James
Whatever place she called home had to be immaculate before she left, as if this punctiliousness could guarantee that she would return safely.

P. D. James
No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

P. D. James
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

P. D. James
It was not... that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life. She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down.

P. D. James
Death... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

P. D. James
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

P. D. James