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P. D. James Quotes
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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
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
P. D. James
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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
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Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
P. D. James
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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
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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
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Death... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.
P. D. James
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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
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When my turn comes I propose to take my lethal capsule comfortably in bed at home and preferably on my own.
P. D. James
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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
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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
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What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.
P. D. James
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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
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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
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
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He was a man whose absence was usually preferable to his presence.
P. D. James
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P. D. James
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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
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Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion of the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.
P. D. James
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Detective fiction... confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible and moral universe.
P. D. James
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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
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
P. D. James
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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
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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
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There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.
P. D. James
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Quote of the day
Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth.
John Lyly
P. D. James
Creative Commons
Born:
August 3, 1920
Died:
November 27, 2014
(aged 94)
Bio:
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh.
Known for:
Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)
Cover Her Face (1962)
The Children of Men (1992)
The Private Patient (2008)
The Murder Room (2003)
Most used words:
people
dead
human
love
live
time
feel
life
death
future
experience
hope
fear
god
evidence
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