P D James Quotes

#1. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Donna Leon

#2. I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot.

Martha Grimes

#3. SOYINKA WON THE NOBEL PRIZE
ACHEBE, LITERARY COMMANDER
P.D. JAMES, WE LOVE HER
AGATHA CHRISTIE, QUEEN OF CRIME

S.A. David

#4. The detective story is not about murder," P. D. James has written, "but the restoration of order.

Anonymous

#5. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble.

P.D. James

#6. Love, always love. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for. And if we don't get it early enough we panic in case we never shall.

P.D. James

#7. 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.

P.D. James

#8. Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

P.D. James

#9. First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

P.D. James

#10. There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

P.D. James

#11. You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.

P.D. James

#12. The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.

P.D. James

#13. Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

P.D. James

#14. The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

P.D. James

#15. 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.

P.D. James

#16. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

P.D. James

#17. You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.

P.D. James

#18. Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

P.D. James

#19. Nothing and no one will separate us, not life nor death, nor principalities, nor powers, nor anything that is of the heavens nor anything that is of the earth.

P.D. James

#20. And would she herself have married Darcy had he been a penniless curate or a struggling attorney? ... Elizabeth knew that she was not formed for the sad contrivances of poverty.

P.D. James

#21. Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.

P.D. James

#22. People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.

P.D. James

#23. Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

P.D. James

#24. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it.

P.D. James

#25. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

P.D. James

#26. Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

P.D. James

#27. OK, she's dead and you feel guilty, and feeling guilt isn't something you enjoy. Too bad. Get used to it. Why the hell should you escape guilt? It's part of being human. Or hadn't you noticed?

P.D. James

#28. But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?"
"That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.

P.D. James

#29. Every island to a child is a treasure island.

P.D. James

#30. A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

P.D. James

#31. There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.

P.D. James

#32. 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.

P.D. James

#33. 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.

P.D. James

#34. Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

P.D. James

#35. It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

P.D. James

#36. Equality is a political theory not a practical policy ...

P.D. James

#37. The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

P.D. James

#38. Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

P.D. James

#39. I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

P.D. James

#40. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

P.D. James

#41. Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

P.D. James

#42. The most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

P.D. James

#43. Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

P.D. James

#44. When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

P.D. James

#45. Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure, but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge.

P.D. James

#46. 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.

P.D. James

#47. I was like a little boy showing off my toys, desperate to win approval.

P.D. James

#48. I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

P.D. James

#49. pedimented doors to right and left, an oil painting of the

P.D. James

#50. Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

P.D. James

#51. 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.

P.D. James

#52. Your concern would have more weight with us if you were sitting
as you could be sitting
on this side of the table.

P.D. James

#53. It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

P.D. James

#54. Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

P.D. James

#55. Old age makes caricatures of us all.

P.D. James

#56. We can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

P.D. James

#57. 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?

P.D. James

#58. All motives can be explained under the letter L: lust, lucre, loathing and love. They'll tell you the most dangerous is loathing but don't you believe it, boy; the most dangerous is love.

P.D. James

#59. All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

P.D. James

#60. I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people's.

P.D. James

#61. It is some centuries since we accepted that a woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted that she also has a mind?

P.D. James

#62. A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian villa in Swiss Cottage with its comfortable sitting-room and atmosphere of timeless indulgence.

P.D. James

#63. We are often more merciful to our animals [cats] than we are to each other.

P.D. James

#64. Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

P.D. James

#65. We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

P.D. James

#66. He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.

P.D. James

#67. For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

P.D. James

#68. It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

P.D. James

#69. We have all sinned, Mr. Darcy, and we cannot look for mercy without showing it in our lives.

P.D. James

#70. What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.

P.D. James

#71. Don't let what's happened spoil your life; it doesn't have to. If help is offered, take it if you want it. But in the end, find the strength to take hold of your own life and make what you want of it. Even the bad dreams fade in time.

P.D. James

#72. Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

P.D. James

#73. A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

P.D. James

#74. The attempt to analyse was, of course, an attempt at exorcism.

P.D. James

#75. By 1803, therefore, Mrs Bennet could be regarded as a happy woman so far as her nature allowed and had even been known to sit through a four-course dinner in the presence of Sir William and Lady Lucas without once referring to the iniquity of the entail.

P.D. James

#76. I love you, Guy, and I think I shall go on loving you, but I'm not in love. I've had that and it was a torment, a humiliation and a warning. So now I'm settling for a quiet life with someone I respect and am very fond of and want to spend my life with.

P.D. James

#77. The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

P.D. James

#78. Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

P.D. James

#79. Darcy took the view that if family amity required him to meet people with whom he had little in common, it were best done at their expense not his.

P.D. James

#80. They also accused her of being sardonic, and although there was uncertainty about the meaning of the word, they knew it was not a desirable quality in a woman, being one which gentlemen particularly disliked.

P.D. James

#81. We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we feel in control.

P.D. James

#82. Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

P.D. James

#83. It was a fashionable and expensive academy but there was no loving care, and it inculcated pride and the values of the fashionable world, not sound learning and good sense.

P.D. James

#84. Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault.

P.D. James

#85. For heaven's sake, Darling, keep your crusading instinct [for social justice] under control ... It's uncomfortable to live with especially for those of us who haven't got one.

P.D. James

#86. 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.

P.D. James

#87. Guilt is more commonly felt by the innocent than by the culpable,

P.D. James

#88. What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

P.D. James

#89. I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

P.D. James

#90. 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.

P.D. James

#91. Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.

P.D. James

#92. Fear is the devil to hide.

P.D. James

#93. Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

P.D. James

#94. However long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

P.D. James

#95. Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

P.D. James

#96. 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.

P.D. James

#97. The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels.

P.D. James

#98. But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.

P.D. James

#99. She strutted into the room, armour-plated in white linen, belligerent as a battleship. The bib of her apron, starched rigid as a board, curved against a formidable bosom on which she wore her nursing badges like medals of war.

P.D. James

#100. [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.

P.D. James