P. D. James Quotes
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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.
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I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.
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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.
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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.
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It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
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We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
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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?
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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.
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It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.
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Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
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Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.
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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.
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Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
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In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.
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Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
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History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.
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I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
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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.