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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

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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
Commit
Otherwise
Intelligence
Sin
Wells
Proposing
Well
Defying
Think
Thinking
Insulting

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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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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
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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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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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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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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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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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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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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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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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Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
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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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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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