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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

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
Writing
Experiment
Even
Experiments
Every
Scientist
Time
Discovery
Learning
Comes
Science
Write

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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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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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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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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.
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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
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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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A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.
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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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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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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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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.
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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.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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 shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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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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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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