P.D. James quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by P.D. James

P.D. James Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from P.D. James on Wise Famous Quotes.

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving ...

Your concern would have more weight with us if you were sitting
as you could be sitting
on this side of the table.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

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.

It is never so difficult to congratulate a friend on her good fortune than when that fortune appears undeserved.

If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

Love, always love. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for. And if we don't get it early enough we panic in case we never shall.

The unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

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.

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

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

We have all sinned, Mr. Darcy, and we cannot look for mercy without showing it in our lives.

Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can't share either experience.

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

Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault.

The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.

Delightful and sensitive boys have a habit of growing into insensitive and far-from-agreeable men.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

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.

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

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

The greatest mystery of all is the human heart,

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

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.

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.

Gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

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?

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than Homo sapiens.

You'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

However long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend's money to your own satisfaction and his benefit.

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

It is interesting how often unintelligent, even stupid, women manage their emotional lives more satisfactorily than do their cleverer sisters.

Fear is the devil to hide.

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

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

The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.

We are neither of us the people we were then. Let us look on the past only as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

The attempt to analyse was, of course, an attempt at exorcism.

She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.

We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we feel in control.

Henry James's definition of the purpose of a novel: To help the human heart to know itself.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

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

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

Surely it is important that people who love each other should be able to speak openly and truly about matters which touch them.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

Mrs. Maxie wondered whether anyone could be as stupid as Sir Reynold appeared to be

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

We are often more merciful to our animals [cats] than we are to each other.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

One does not kill to avoid social inconvenience.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

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

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

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

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people's.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.

Darcy took the view that if family amity required him to meet people with whom he had little in common, it were best done at their expense not his.

dresses, some of the girls in clothes which

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

We can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

Guilt is more commonly felt by the innocent than by the culpable,

I was like a little boy showing off my toys, desperate to win approval.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels.

Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

It is some centuries since we accepted that a woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted that she also has a mind?

Equality is a political theory not a practical policy ...

(A murderer about their victim
He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.