Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by P. D. James - Page 2

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.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

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.

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

[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.

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.

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

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.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

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

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.

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

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.

Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.

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.

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

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.

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

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

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

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.

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.

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!

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

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

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

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.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

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

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

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

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.

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.

The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

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

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

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.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

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

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

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

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

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

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

Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

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.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

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

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

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

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

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

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.