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

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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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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Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
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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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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
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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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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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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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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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
P. D. James
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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
P. D. James
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
P. D. James
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It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
P. D. James
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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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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
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If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?
P. D. James
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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
P. D. James