P. D. James Quotes
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I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
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God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.
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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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Whatever else I am now, I'm never bored.
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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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I didn't love him, but I liked him being in love with me.
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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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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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It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.
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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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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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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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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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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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Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.
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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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I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.
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I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.
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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
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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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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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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.
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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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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.