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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

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
Hardly
Total
Conducive
Healthy
Combines
Development
Surveillance
Indulgence
Regime
Regimes
Perpetual

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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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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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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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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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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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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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If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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