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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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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
Murder
Story
Order
Stories
Detective
Detectives
Restoration

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the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.
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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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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?
P. D. James
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
P. D. James
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There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
P. D. James
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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
P. D. James
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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
P. D. James
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P. D. James
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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
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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.
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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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
P. D. James
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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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[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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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!
P. D. James
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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.
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