P. D. James Quotes

132 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

P. D. James