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

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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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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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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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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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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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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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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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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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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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