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14a47d8
|
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.
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|
sexuality
|
P.D. James |
|
62e7d97
|
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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|
pain
|
P.D. James |
|
cd1e130
|
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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|
pain
feel
experience
|
P.D. James |
|
6f2b2a9
|
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
|
|
romance
|
P.D. James |
|
5913e2c
|
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
|
|
solitude
responsibility
love
self-sufficiency
protection
|
P.D. James |
|
69bd7bc
|
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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|
seasons
fall
england
weather
|
P.D. James |
|
e3d7748
|
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 |
|
0c4693b
|
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.
|
|
humour
humor
xan
theo
false
genuine
|
P.D. James |
|
b1db145
|
Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
e5e1073
|
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 |
|
f34f0e8
|
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
|
|
writing
learning-by-doing
|
P.D. James |
|
5f857fc
|
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
|
|
grudge
human-nature
|
P.D. James |
|
55216cf
|
The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
3497fc6
|
Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.
|
|
secret
mask
mystery
psychology
|
P.D. James |
|
20b828b
|
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 blin..
|
|
life
|
P.D. James |
|
5c00224
|
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.
|
|
regret
|
P.D. James |
|
deae0f0
|
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
|
|
islands
|
P.D. James |
|
ef22980
|
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 |
|
340deca
|
All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.
|
|
murder
pd-james
the-murder-room
|
P.D. James |
|
b2956db
|
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 |
|
6bbc9ff
|
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.
|
|
the-future
pessimism
posterity
|
P.D. James |
|
72623a7
|
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."
|
|
world
extinction
|
P.D. James |
|
76c308e
|
I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
|
|
humour
humor
love
theo
|
P.D. James |
|
991b6a6
|
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.
|
|
writing
romance-novels
|
P.D. James |
|
7a4bb78
|
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 |
|
56158c4
|
If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
0ec0fa8
|
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.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
16d61a6
|
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.
|
|
intelligent-life
pessimism
|
P.D. James |
|
2eefdf2
|
We have all sinned, Mr. Darcy, and we cannot look for mercy without showing it in our lives.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
d88c5cd
|
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.
|
|
memory
|
P.D. James |
|
7146045
|
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
|
|
violence
sex
|
P.D. James |
|
32bae08
|
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
|
|
nakedness
naked
|
P.D. James |
|
ae8d583
|
There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.
|
|
unhappiness
love
pride
|
P.D. James |
|
bdc2423
|
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 |
|
eed84e3
|
We are neither of us the people we were then. Let us look on the past only as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
afccb1c
|
She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.
|
|
sadness
|
P.D. James |
|
0bb9218
|
We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can't share either experience.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
c0b71aa
|
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 |
|
645171e
|
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 |
|
cea10d1
|
What do you mean by sound government?'
|
|
politics
|
P.D. James |
|
0dc5def
|
On the whole I'm glad; you can't mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensations. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically p..
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
35ecf57
|
A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
|
|
|
P.D. James |
|
bb6483d
|
Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.
|
|
innocence
|
P.D. James |
|
18cc996
|
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 |