P. D. James - Life Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

P. D. James
First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

P. D. James
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
They are, after all, one of the most graceful of life's fragile diversions.

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
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

P. D. James
It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

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

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
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