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

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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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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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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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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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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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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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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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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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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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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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
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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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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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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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