P. D. James Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

  P. D. James

  Order, Ideas, Guilt

  Interview With Jennifer Reese, www.salon.com. February 26, 1998.

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

  P. D. James

  Kindness, May, Firsts

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.416, Vintage

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

  P. D. James

  Grief, Terrible, Over It

  P.D. James (2012). “Innocent Blood”, p.368, Simon and Schuster

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• If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?

  P. D. James

  Thinking, Insulting, Sin

  P.D. James (2015). “P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries: Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes, Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and Death of an Expert Witness”, p.784, Simon and Schuster

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• the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

  P. D. James

  Successful, Feelings, Done

  P. D. James (2008). “The Lighthouse”, p.30, Faber & Faber

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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

  People, Alive, Clubs

  P. D. James (2008). “Original Sin”, p.25, Faber & Faber

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• Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

  P. D. James

  Heart, Desire, Want

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.505, Vintage

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• All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.

  P. D. James

  Believe, Law, People

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• Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

  P. D. James

  Youth, Immortality

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.211, Vintage

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• The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

  P. D. James

  Political, Political Theory, Theory

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• You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

  P. D. James

  People, Childhood, Kind

  P. D. James (2008). “The Lighthouse”, p.177, Faber & Faber

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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

  Years, Care, Might

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• [My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

  P. D. James

  Father, Equality, Skills

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• The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

  P. D. James

  Loss, Grieving, Tragedy

  P. D. James (2008). “Original Sin”, p.41, Faber & Faber

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

  P. D. James

  Doctors, Hands, Life And Death

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• 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

  Faith, Teaching, People

  P. D. James (2008). “A Taste for Death”, p.280, Faber & Faber

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• Old age makes caricatures of us all.

  P. D. James

  Age, Caricatures, Old Age

  P. D. James (2010). “A Taste for Death”, p.239, Vintage

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• I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

  P. D. James

  Regret, Writing, Men

  P. D. James (2008). “The Children of Men”, p.124, Faber & Faber

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• A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

  P. D. James

  Men, Cities, Violence

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• We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.

  P. D. James

  Cat, Animal, Merciful

  "Time to Be in Earnest".

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• It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.

  P. D. James

  Struggle, Compassion, Echoes

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.157, Vintage

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• Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

  P. D. James

  Confusing, Identity, Senses

  P. D. James (1984). “Trilogy of Death: Three Complete Novels”, Scribner Book Company

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• Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

  P. D. James

  Together, Reason, Humans

  P.D. James (2012). “The Skull Beneath the Skin: A Cordelia Gray Mystery”, p.374, Simon and Schuster

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• Every island to a child is a treasure island.

  P. D. James

  Children, Islands, Treasure

  P. D. James (2008). “The Lighthouse”, p.82, Faber & Faber

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• If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

  P. D. James

  Pride, Overcoming, Novelists

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Mar 02, 2013

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