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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
Havens
Haven
Secret
Getting
Chance
Anything
Contentment
Reason
Tells
Never
Allow
More quotes by P. D. James
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.
P. D. James
[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
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.
P. D. James
The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
P. D. James
All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.
P. D. James
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.
P. D. James
we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
P. D. James
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.
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
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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 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
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
P. D. James
however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
P. D. James
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
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
