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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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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
Time
Appeal
Sentence
Appeals
Escape
Sentences
Serve
Prison
Childhood

More quotes by 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.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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[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.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
P. D. James
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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.
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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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It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.
P. D. James
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Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
P. D. James
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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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Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about 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
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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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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
P. D. James