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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

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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
Money
Governments
Government
Generosity
People
Generous
Individuals
Safety
Virtue
Future
Individual

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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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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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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.
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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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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
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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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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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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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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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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P. D. James