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

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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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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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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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All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.
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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.
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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.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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.
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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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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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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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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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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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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