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

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
Life
Considerable
Energies
Towards
Direct
Wisdom
Getting
Energy
Shows

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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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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.
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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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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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First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
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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.
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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.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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