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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?

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
Credible
Periods
Novelist
Pride
Novelists
Short
Overcome
Fiction
Prejudice
Even
Overcoming
Make
Contrive
Brilliant
Subdued
Period

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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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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?
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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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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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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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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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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.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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.
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The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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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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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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