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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

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
Widely
Discrimination
Read
Writing
Contagious

More quotes by P. D. James

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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
P. D. James
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
P. D. James
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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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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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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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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.
P. D. James
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
P. D. James
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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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
P. D. James
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
P. D. James
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James
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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
P. D. James
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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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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.
P. D. James