P. D. James Quotes
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God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.
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Whatever else I am now, I'm never bored.
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A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.
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I didn't love him, but I liked him being in love with me.
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The Man Penal settlement. Do you know whats happening there? The murders, the starvation, the complete breakdown of law and order.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.
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Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.
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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.
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We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.
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I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.
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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.
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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.
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Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.
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First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
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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.
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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.
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I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?
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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.
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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
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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.