P. D. James Quotes

132 Sourced Quotes

Books of quotations... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

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
We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

P. D. James
The most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

P. D. James
He was a man whose absence was usually preferable to his presence.

P. D. James
Love, always love. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for.

P. D. James
To look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory.... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

P. D. James
I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

P. D. James
In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

P. D. James
The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

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
If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

P. D. James
There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

P. D. James
Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

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
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

P. D. James
History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

P. D. James
Detective fiction... confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible and moral universe.

P. D. James
Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion of the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

P. D. James
I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.

P. D. James
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

P. D. James
Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not Governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future.

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
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

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
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

P. D. James
Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

P. D. James
She only knew what she didn't want. Her needs had seemed to him reassuringly modest, her unwants had all the force of strong desire.

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

P. D. James
The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.

P. D. James