Best 149 quotes of P. D. James on MyQuotes

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.

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.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

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.

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.

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.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

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.

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.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

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.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

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.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

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?

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?

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

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.

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.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.