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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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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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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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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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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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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.
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Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.
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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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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
P. D. James
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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.
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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.
P. D. James
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
P. D. James
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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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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James