Quote

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

P. D. James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Still
Susceptible
Might
Unnatural
Always
Peculiar
Things
Realization
Uncomfortable
Control
Unease
Death
Bureaucratic
Stills
Provoked

More quotes by P. D. James

Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
Image
Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
P. D. James
Image
the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.
P. D. James
Image
The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
P. D. James
Image
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
P. D. James
Image
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P. D. James
Image
Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
P. D. James
Image
But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of? That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.
P. D. James
Image
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
P. D. James
Image
Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.
P. D. James
Image
Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
P. D. James
Image
A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James
Image
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?
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
P. D. James