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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

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
Release
Obligation
Forgiving
English
Releases
Enemy
Liking
Friends
Sarcasm
War
Sarcastic
Good
Enemies

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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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read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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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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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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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.
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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?
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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
P. D. James
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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.
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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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
P. D. James