A Quote by P. D. James

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

Quote Topics

Appeal Childhood Escape One Sentence Our Our Time Prison Sentence Serve Time Which

Quote Author

P. D. James
English - Novelist
August 3, 1920 - November 27, 2014

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

A. S. Byatt

This is serious, if Martha gets the maximum sentence on all counts, she could serve 20 years in prison. Of course, you have to take off time off for good behavior, which means 20 years in prison.

Conan O'Brien

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

T. E. Lawrence

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

J. R. R. Tolkien

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

Henry David Thoreau

Faced with today's problems and disappointments , many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.

Pope John Paul II

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

Jean Cocteau

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Anais Nin

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

Oscar Wilde

True Socialism, in which everyone is truly equal, does not just resemble a prison - it is a prison. It can not exist unless it is surrounded by high walls, by watchtowers and by guard-dogs, for people always want to escape from any socialist regime, just as they do from a prison. If you continue your attempts to establish a model society you will need to build walls around it. You will be forced to do so sooner or later by the flood of refugees.

Viktor Suvorov

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

Aldous Huxley

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

Jeffrey Eugenides

The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Margaret Atwood

Temporary feelings of regret are a normal part of the mourning process. This helps us retrieve our lost dreams. If we hold on to regret, we risk trapping ourselves in a prison of unrealized dreams from which it is difficult to escape.