Best 149 quotes of P. D. James on MyQuotes

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

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.

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

(A murderer about their victim:) "He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development. If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.

Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.

Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience--that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn't sounded or that he hadn't heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

Dictating condolences to the mother of a murdered husband whom you’ve been busily cuckolding for the last three years would take more than his limited social vocabulary.

Even as a child, I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.

I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn't anything to do with being young

I don’t think He bargains.” “Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to he just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.’ “That He exists?” “That He cares.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

I gave him the qualities I personally admire in either sex—intelligence, courage but not foolhardiness, sensitivity but not sentimentality, and reticence.

I mean, when a chap keeps on saying that life isn't worth living you take it that he's just stating the obvious. When he backs it up with action you begin to wonder if there wasn't more to him than you thought.

It is interesting how often unintelligent, even stupid, women manage their emotional lives more satisfactorily than do their cleverer sisters.

…It was embarrassing now to recall with what little regret he had let slip his pleasures and preoccupations, the imminence of loss revealing them for what they were, at best only a solace, at worst a trivial squandering of time and energy. Now he had to lay hold of them again and believe that they were important, at least to himself. He doubted whether he would ever again believe them important to other people.

It wasn't the loss of freedom that deterred him; the men who squealed most about that were usually the least free. Much more difficult to face was the loss of privacy.

OK, she’s dead and you feel guilty, and feeling guilt isn’t something you enjoy. Too bad. Get used to it. Why the hell should you escape guilt? It’s part of being human. Or hadn’t you noticed?

Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious." [Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010 (with Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, and AL Kennedy)]

She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.

SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field.

Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them.

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.

Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure, but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge.

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.

The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.

The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.

We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..." "What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh. "Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity." "A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

What do you mean by sound government?' Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.' Then we haven't got sound government.

With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.

You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.