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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

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
Always
Infanticide
Equate
Authors
Badly
Rejection
Take

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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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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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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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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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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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
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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 most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.
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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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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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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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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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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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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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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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