PD James quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by PD James

Top PD James Quotes

Browse top 76 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by PD James.

Favorite PD James Quotes

1. "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." ~ P.D. James

2. "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." ~ P.D. James

3. "They also accused her of being sardonic, and although there was uncertainty about the meaning of the word, they knew it was not a desirable quality in a woman, being one which gentlemen particularly disliked." ~ P.D. James

4. "The New World is not a refuge for the indolent, the criminal, the undesirable of the old, but a young man who has been clearly acquitted of a capital crime, has shown fortitude during his ordeal and has shown outstanding bravery in the field of battle appears to have the qualifications which will ensure his welcome." ~ P.D. James

5. "She was wearing a hat heavily trimmed with crisp pink ribbons which looked new, bought no doubt as tribute to the importance of the occasion. It would have been more impressive had it not sat atop a bush of bright yellow hair and from time to time she touched it as if unsure whether it was still on her head." ~ P.D. James

6. "By 1803, therefore, Mrs Bennet could be regarded as a happy woman so far as her nature allowed and had even been known to sit through a four-course dinner in the presence of Sir William and Lady Lucas without once referring to the iniquity of the entail." ~ P.D. James

7. "..he began drinking heavily and lived in a way which a friend described as making sense "only if he had no expectations of being alive much beyond Thursday"." ~ P.D. James

8. "Neighbors whose jealousy of such a triumph exceeded any satisfaction in the prospect of the union were able to console themselves by averring that Mr Darcy's pride and his wife's caustic wit would ensure that they lived together in the utmost misery for which even Pemberley and ten thousand a year could offer no consolation." ~ P.D. James

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

10. "o'clock" ~ P.D. James

11. "I had to make a moral decision. 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

12. "People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?" ~ P.D. James

13. "The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting." ~ P.D. James

14. "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." ~ P.D. James

15. "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." ~ P.D. James

16. "Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time." ~ P.D. James

17. "Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports." ~ P.D. James

18. "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." ~ P.D. James

19. "Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life." ~ P.D. James

20. "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

21. "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." ~ P.D. James

22. "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." ~ P.D. James

23. "Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence." ~ P.D. James

24. "If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils." ~ P.D. James

25. "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." ~ P.D. James

26. "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)]" ~ P.D. James

27. "Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense." ~ P.D. James

28. "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." ~ P.D. James

29. "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." ~ P.D. James

30. "It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us." ~ P.D. James

31. "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" ~ P.D. James

32. "All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius." ~ P.D. James

33. "She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love." ~ P.D. James

34. "(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." ~ P.D. James

35. "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." ~ P.D. James

36. "History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species." ~ P.D. James

37. "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?" ~ P.D. James

38. "But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all." ~ P.D. James

39. "I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art." ~ P.D. James

40. "The library at Pemberley was as freely open to her as it was to Darcy, and with his tactful and loving encouragement she had read more widely and with greater enjoyment and comprehension in the last six years than in all the past fifteen, augmenting an education which, she now understood, had never been other than rudimentary." ~ P.D. James

41. "If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars." ~ P.D. James

42. "All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing." ~ P.D. James

43. "Crime fiction "confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe." ~ P.D. James

44. "Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one." ~ P.D. James

45. "But gratitude can be the very devil sometimes, particularly if you have to be grateful for services you'd rather be without." ~ P.D. James

46. "Good. I do dislike discussing wine longer than I need." ~ P.D. James

47. "You won't get love from a child if you don't give love." ~ P.D. James

48. "There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness." ~ P.D. James

49. "The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted." ~ P.D. James

50. "Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity." ~ P.D. James

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I've been around many girls who have been super outgoing. And a lot of times, they would say to me, "Why are you so quiet? What's wrong with you?" And I'm like, "I don't know. That's just the way I am." So if I found the perfect girl she would totally get that and say, "You're quiet, and that's the way I love you."
Author: Adam Young

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