P. D. James Quotes
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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, don't you think?
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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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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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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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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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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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[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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Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.
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The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.
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Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
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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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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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Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?
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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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Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.
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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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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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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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Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
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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.