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

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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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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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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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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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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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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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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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[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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A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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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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