Quote

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.

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
Great
Hundred
Every
Grow
Years
Grows
Transpire
Literature
Middlemarch
Actually
Impoverished
Cannot
Neglected
Care
Soil
Might
Tend

More quotes by P. D. James

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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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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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[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
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First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
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The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
P. D. James
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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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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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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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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
P. D. James
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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.
P. D. James
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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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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P. D. James