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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

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P. D. James
Age: 94 †
Born: 1920
Born: August 3
Died: 2014
Died: November 27
Member Of The House Of Lords
Novelist
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Phyllis Dorothy James
Phyllis Dorothy James
Baroness James of Holland Park
Phyllis James
Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James
Longer
Shall
Sure
Religion
Mean
Believe

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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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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.
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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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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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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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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.
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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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.
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[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.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
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There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
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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?
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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P. D. James