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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

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
Soon
May
Gush
Firsts
Dries
Human
Defective
Humans
Impressive
First
Stream
Like
Streams
Kindness

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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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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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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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.
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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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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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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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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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