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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
Restoration
Murder
Story
Order
Stories
Detective
Detectives
More quotes by P. D. James
A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
P. D. James
A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.
P. D. James
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
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
P. D. James
The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P. D. James
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
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
P. D. James
Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P. D. James
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
The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
P. D. James
No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
P. D. James
It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
P. D. James
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
Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
P. D. James
I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P. D. James
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.
P. D. James
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
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P. D. James
