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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.
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
Getting
Chance
Anything
Contentment
Reason
Tells
Never
Allow
Havens
Haven
Secret
More quotes by P. D. James
Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.
P. D. James
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.
P. D. James
we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
P. D. James
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.
P. D. James
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
P. D. James
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
It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.
P. D. James
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
P. D. James
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
P. D. James
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.
P. D. James
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
P. D. James
Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
P. D. James
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
P. D. James
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
P. D. James
Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
P. D. James
Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
P. D. James
No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
P. D. James
First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
P. D. James
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
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
P. D. James
