P. D. James
P. D. James
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 August 1920
cat animal merciful
We are often more merciful to our animals [cats] than we are to each other.
secret contentment want
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
judgement may matter
It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.
struggle compassion air
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.
love-you tragedy half
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?
inspirational children kids
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
want looks protection
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
race mind crumbling
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.
men past beast
Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
realization might peculiar
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
thinking insulting sin
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?
together reason humans
Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
retirement people unemployment
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
book reading pleasure
Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.