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

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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.
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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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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?
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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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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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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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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 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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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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.
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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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Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
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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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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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