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

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
Assault
Sexual
Excited
Violence
Death
People
Voluntarily
Endured
Momentary

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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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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
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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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Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
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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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read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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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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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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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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!
P. D. James
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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
P. D. James
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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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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
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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