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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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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
Retirement
People
Status
Dignity
Meaning
Wasn
Dreaded
Traumatic
Found
Bestow
Work
Unemployment
Men

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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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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!
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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.
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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?
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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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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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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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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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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