P. D. James Quotes
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to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
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The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.
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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 wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
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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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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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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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.
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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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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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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.
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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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.
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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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read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.
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Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.
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the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.
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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
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Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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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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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
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P. D. James
- Born: August 3, 1920
- Died: November 27, 2014
- Occupation: Member of the House of Lords