P D James Quotes

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

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

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give. ~ P.D. James

We can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us. ~ P.D. James

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

She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love. ~ P.D. James

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

The English, thought Kate, obviously regarded praying much as they did a necessary physical function, something best done in private. Dalgliesh apologized for interrupting her work: We're police officers and I'm afraid we're here on police business. Were you ~ 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

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. ~ P.D. James

By 1803, therefore, Mrs Bennet could be regarded as a happy woman so far as her nature allowed and had even been known to sit through a four-course dinner in the presence of Sir William and Lady Lucas without once referring to the iniquity of the entail. ~ P.D. James

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

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

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity. ~ P.D. James

The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us. ~ P.D. James

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment. ~ P.D. James

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

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

One of her parlour borders, Miss Harriet Smith, married a local farmer, Robert Martin, and is very happily settled. They have three daughters and a son, but the doctor has told her it is unlikely that further children can be expected and she and her husband are anxious to have another son as playmate to their own. Mr and Mrs Knightley of Donwell Abbey are the most important couple in Highbury, and Mrs Knightley is a friend of Mrs Martin and has always taken a keen interest in her children. ~ P.D. James

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

The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels. ~ P.D. James

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

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

This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. ~ P.D. James

Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them. ~ P.D. James

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

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

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is.
Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy? ~ P.D. James

We were polluting the planet with our numbers; if we were breeding less it was to be welcomed. ~ P.D. James

Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?" "It's vital. If a child has it for the first ten years, hardly anything else matters. If he hasn't, then nothing does. ~ P.D. James

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

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

His room was still and very quiet, insulated by sound building and oak boards from the jabber of the dissenting voices below. He unlatched the window in the seaward wall and forced it open with both hands against the blast of the gale. the wind rushed into the room swirling the bed cover into folds, sweeping the papers from his desk and rustling the pages of his bedside Jane Austen like a giant hand. It took his breath away so that he leaned gasping against the window ledge, welcoming the sting of spray on his face and tasting the salt drying on his lips. When he closed the window the silence seemed absolute. The thundering surf receded and faded like the far-away moaning on another shore. ~ P.D. James

They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn't regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty. ~ P.D. James

Even as a child, I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye. ~ P.D. James

But gratitude can be the very devil sometimes, particularly if you have to be grateful for services you'd rather be without. ~ P.D. James

Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense. ~ P.D. James

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

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity. ~ P.D. James

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

Find depressing his determination to make his characters suffer even when a little common sense on both his part and theirs could avoid it. Tess is one of the most irritating young women in Victorian fiction. Won ~ P.D. James

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence. ~ P.D. James

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

He said: "It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity." They ~ P.D. James

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction. ~ P.D. James

The New World is not a refuge for the indolent, the criminal, the undesirable of the old, but a young man who has been clearly acquitted of a capital crime, has shown fortitude during his ordeal and has shown outstanding bravery in the field of battle appears to have the qualifications which will ensure his welcome. ~ P.D. James

Has it ever occurred to you that a woman, when she is powerful, is more powerful than a man?" "Powerful in a different way, perhaps." Laud said: "It's a power partly based on fear. Perhaps the fear is atavistic, memories of babyhood. Women change the nappy, give the breast or withhold it." Langton said with a faint smile: "Not now, apparently. Fathers change nappies and it's usually a bottle." "But I'm right, Hubert, about power and fear. I wouldn't say it outside these walls, but life in Chambers would be a great deal easier if Venetia fell under that convenient Number 11 bus." He paused, and then asked the question to which he needed an answer. "So I have your support, have I? Can I take it that I'm your choice to succeed you as Head of Chambers? ~ P.D. James

Nothing and no one will separate us, not life nor death, nor principalities, nor powers, nor anything that is of the heavens nor anything that is of the earth. ~ 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

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life. ~ P.D. James

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art. ~ P.D. James

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

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time. ~ P.D. James

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. ~ P.D. James

The emotion he felt towards her was as mysterious as it was irrational. He needed to understand it, to define its nature, to analyse what he knew was beyond analysis. But some things now he did know, and perhaps they were all he needed to know. He wished her only good. He would put her good before his own. He could no longer be separate himself from her. He would die for her life. ~ P.D. James

The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors. ~ P.D. James

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

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure. ~ P.D. James

Guilt is more commonly felt by the innocent than by the culpable, ~ P.D. James

She would not wish anyone violently dead but, since it had happened, one might as well make the most of it. ~ P.D. James

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

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order. ~ 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

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

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

It is generally accepted that divine service affords a legitimate opportunity for the congregation to assess not only the appearance, deportment, elegance and possible wealth of new arrivals to the parish, but the demeanour of any of their neighbours known to be in an interesting situation, ranging from pregnancy to bankruptcy. ~ P.D. James

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

Theo awoke to a weight of vague unease, not heavy enough to be called anxiety, but a mild unfocused depression, like the last tatters of an unremembered but disagreeable dream. ~ P.D. James

I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn't anything to do with being young ~ P.D. James

Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm. ~ P.D. James

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter. ~ P.D. James

There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right. ~ P.D. James

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

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

The detective story is not about murder," P. D. James has written, "but the restoration of order. ~ Anonymous

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

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

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

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man's-land. ~ P.D. James

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

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

I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot. ~ Martha Grimes

Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it. ~ P.D. James

There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country. ~ P.D. James

Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence. ~ P.D. James

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

The library at Pemberley was as freely open to her as it was to Darcy, and with his tactful and loving encouragement she had read more widely and with greater enjoyment and comprehension in the last six years than in all the past fifteen, augmenting an education which, she now understood, had never been other than rudimentary. ~ P.D. James

He still attended every Sunday. It was as much a part of his routine as buying the same two Sunday newspapers at the same stall on his way home, the luncheon taken from the fridge and heated up in obedience to Erik's written instructions, the short afternoon walk through the park, then the hour of sleep and the evening of television. The ~ P.D. James

Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows. ~ P.D. James

Nothing that happens to a writer--however happy, however tragic--is ever wasted. ~ P.D. James

He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love. ~ P.D. James

Dictating condolences to the mother of a murdered husband whom you've been busily cuckolding for the last three years would take more than his limited social vocabulary. ~ P.D. James

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets. ~ P.D. James

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. ~ P.D. James

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

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. ~ P.D. James

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism. ~ P.D. James