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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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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
Make
Never
Reparation
Reparations
Murder
Victim
Unique
Crime

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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.
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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.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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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.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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.
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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.
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I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
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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.
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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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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.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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.
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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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