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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.

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

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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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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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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.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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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.
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
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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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[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
P. D. James
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
P. D. James
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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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.
P. D. James
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
P. D. James
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
P. D. James
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James