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Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

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
Open
Happy
Wasted
Happens
Tragic
Ever
Particularly
Nothing
Experiences
Mind
However
People
Writer
Study

More quotes by P. D. James

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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
P. D. James
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
P. D. James
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
P. D. James
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If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?
P. D. James
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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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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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
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
P. D. James
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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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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
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
P. D. James
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
P. D. James
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
P. D. James
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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