P. D. James Quotes

132 Sourced Quotes

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

P. D. James
Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

P. D. James
Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

P. D. James
Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

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
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
A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

P. D. James
I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.

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
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
When my turn comes I propose to take my lethal capsule comfortably in bed at home and preferably on my own.

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
A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

P. D. James
What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

P. D. James
She had always found it difficult to believe what experience had taught her, that men and women could be physically beautiful without also possessing some comparable qualities of mind and spirit, that beauty could be wasted on the mundane, the ignorant or the stupid.

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
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

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

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

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

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