110+ P. D. James Quotes On Education, Bible And Success

P. D. James was an English novelist, best known for her crime fiction works. She wrote more than 20 novels, many of which featured her detective Adam Dalgliesh. Her books are known for their psychological depth and complex characters, and her work has been adapted into numerous television and film adaptations. Following is our collection on famous quotes by P. D. James on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 P. D. James Quotes

1. It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
2. 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.
3. Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
4. 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.
5. What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
6. When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
7. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
8. Every island to a child is a treasure island.
9. 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.
10. There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

P. D. James Short Quotes

• Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
• What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
• Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
• If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
• The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.
• God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.
• Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
• Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
• Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
• No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

P. D. James Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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. — P. D. James

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

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

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own. — P. D. James

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it. — P. D. James

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

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life. — P. D. James

P. D. James Quotes About Love

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love. — P. D. James

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. — P. D. James

The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us. — P. D. James

Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for. — P. D. James

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

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

P. D. James Quotes About Mystery

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. — P. D. James

The greatest mystery of all is the human heart. — P. D. James

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it. — P. D. James

P. D. James Quotes About English

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. — P. D. James

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends. — P. D. James

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it. — P. D. James

P. D. James Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — P. D. James

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? — P. D. James

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? — P. D. James

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

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

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

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. — P. D. James

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

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity. — P. D. James

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible. — P. D. James

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. — P. D. James

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

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic. — P. D. James

It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less. — P. D. James

the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves. — P. D. James

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

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

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven. — P. D. James

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

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing. — P. D. James

read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided. — P. D. James

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

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography. — P. D. James

Old age makes caricatures of us all. — P. D. James

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear. — P. D. James

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

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

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

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

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs. — P. D. James

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. — P. D. James

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

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. — P. D. James

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

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast. — P. D. James

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

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other. — P. D. James

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves. — P. D. James

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell. — P. D. James

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret. — P. D. James

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. — P. D. James

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. — P. D. James

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

Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them. — P. D. James

Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. — P. D. James

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you. — P. D. James

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. — P. D. James

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land. — P. D. James

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! — P. D. James

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction. — P. D. James

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

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. 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. — P. D. James

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

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed. — P. D. James

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons. — P. D. James

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? — P. D. James

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir? — P. D. James

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. — P. D. James

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

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us. — P. D. James

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. — P. D. James

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people. — P. D. James

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

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

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

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

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

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. — P. D. James

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

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

Life Lessons by P. D. James

P. D. James taught us to be resilient in the face of adversity, to never give up on our dreams, and to always strive to be kind and generous to those around us. She also encouraged us to think deeply and question the status quo, to be open to new ideas and to always seek out knowledge. Finally, she taught us to be humble and to recognize that life is unpredictable, and to always be grateful for the blessings we have.