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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

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
Enough
Long
Never
Springs
Spring
However
Live

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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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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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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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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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Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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 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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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
P. D. James
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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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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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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James