Phyllis Dorothy James (1920-2014)
Known professionally as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels featuring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh. (P D James Quotes)
“All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.”
P.D. James
“All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.”
P.D. James
“Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn’t capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn’t false.”
P.D. James
“Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.”
P.D. James
“Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.”
P.D. James
“God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.”
P.D. James
“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
“I don’t want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”
P.D. James
“I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.”
P.D. James
“I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.”
P.D. James
“If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”
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 only if they persevere.”
P.D. James
“It is never so difficult to congratulate a friend on her good fortune than when that fortune appears undeserved.”
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 shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.”
P.D. James
“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”
P.D. James
“Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.”
P.D. James
“Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”
P.D. James
“Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.”
P.D. James
“Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer however happy, however tragic is ever wasted.”
P.D. James
“People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.”
P.D. James
“Perhaps it’s only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it’s too late then for them to do anything about it.”
P.D. James
“The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven’t a chance of getting.”
P.D. James
“The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.”
P.D. James
“The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.”
P.D. James
“Time didn’t heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.”
P.D. James
“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.”
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
“Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.”
P.D. James
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