P. D. James - Experience Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

View all P. D. James Quotes
We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

P. D. James
There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

P. D. James
We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we enjoyed birth. You can't share either experience.

P. D. James
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had if only they persevere.

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
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