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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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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
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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?
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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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.
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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.
P. D. James
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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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Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.
P. D. James