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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

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
Actor
Inexplicable
Actors
Chief
Never
Chiefs
Acts
Explain
Mysterious
Suicide
Private

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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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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
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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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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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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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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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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.
P. D. James
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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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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