Quote

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

P. D. James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by P. D. James

Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
P. D. James
Image
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
Image
The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
P. D. James
Image
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
P. D. James
Image
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
P. D. James
Image
Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
P. D. James
Image
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
P. D. James
Image
Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.
P. D. James
Image
The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
[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.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
P. D. James
Image
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
P. D. James
Image
I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
P. D. James