P. D. James Quotes

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.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

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.

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.

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.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

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