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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

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
Shouldn
Literature
Art
Also
Work
Escapists
Escapist

More quotes by 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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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.
P. D. James
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If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
P. D. James
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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.
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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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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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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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
P. D. James
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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
P. D. James
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
P. D. James
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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.
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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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
P. D. James