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5ae588d
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For heaven's sake, Darling, keep your crusading instinct [for social justice] under control...It's uncomfortable to live with especially for those of us who haven't got one.
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P.D. James |
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bec6610
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It is never so difficult to congratulate a friend on her good fortune than when that fortune appears undeserved.
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P.D. James |
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8091ae0
|
It is doubtful whether Mrs Bennet missed the company of her second daughter, but her husband certainly did. Elizabeth had always been his favourite child.
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P.D. James |
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ade2114
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If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars.
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P.D. James |
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f9572e3
|
The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.
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trust
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P.D. James |
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e2116c9
|
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.
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past
remembrance
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P.D. James |
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9263df9
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Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault.
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P.D. James |
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44f2e39
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It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.
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P.D. James |
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6b3a1d2
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But he still lingered, feeling the wind lift his hair and grateful for another minute of peace. He was grateful, too, that Kate Miskin could share it with him without the need to speak and without making him feel that her silence was a conscious discipline. He had chosen her because he needed a woman in his team and she was the best available. The choice had been partly rational, partly instinctive and he was beginning to realize just how w..
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P.D. James |
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4b713e7
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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?
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P.D. James |
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7c651ca
|
He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.
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P.D. James |
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c90e2b6
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The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
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P.D. James |
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b19c522
|
It had always been a part of his job which he found difficult, the total lack of privacy for the victim. Murder stripped away more than life itself. The body was parceled, labelled, dissected; address books, diaries, confidential letters, every part of the victim's life was sought out and scrutinized. Alien hands moved among the clothes, picked up and examined the small possessions, recorded and labelled for public view the sad detritus of ..
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murder-mysteries
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P.D. James |
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03d8984
|
People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.
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P.D. James |
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9f9dbc3
|
I was like a little boy showing off my toys, desperate to win approval.
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P.D. James |
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3861361
|
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."
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religion
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P.D. James |
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71c2331
|
What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
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pd-james
the-murder-room
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P.D. James |
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5d24215
|
Like all religious evangelists, she realizes that there is little satisfaction in the contemplation of heaven for oneself if one cannot simultaneously contemplate the horrors of hell for others.
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P.D. James |
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003270b
|
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 diff..
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writing
style
talent
writers
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P.D. James |
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3953802
|
The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.
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P.D. James |
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503551b
|
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 appall..
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murder
violent-death
homicide
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P.D. James |
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9fa4028
|
One of her parlour borders, Miss Harriet Smith, married a local farmer, Robert Martin, and is very happily settled. They have three daughters and a son, but the doctor has told her it is unlikely that further children can be expected and she and her husband are anxious to have another son as playmate to their own. Mr and Mrs Knightley of Donwell Abbey are the most important couple in Highbury, and Mrs Knightley is a friend of Mrs Martin and..
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P.D. James |
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e64e983
|
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.
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pain
life
confusion
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P.D. James |
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a82bc03
|
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.
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P.D. James |
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6026b53
|
guilt is more commonly felt by the innocent than by the culpable,
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P.D. James |
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f1c48e4
|
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
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murder
|
P.D. James |
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d615964
|
What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.
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P.D. James |
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5f86509
|
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 mi..
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time
past
london
|
P.D. James |
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b3893a3
|
You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.
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love
|
P.D. James |
|
d2188d8
|
Neither man spoke of the past. Darcy could not rid himself of its power but Wickham lived for the moment, was sanguine about the future and reinvented the past to suit his audience, and Darcy could almost believe that, for the present, he had put the worst of it completely out of his mind. p.172
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P.D. James |
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e97d8a7
|
With the death of what 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.
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religion
salvation
ethics
|
P.D. James |
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473fb9f
|
I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part of the action. It isn't sufficient for them, as ..
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P.D. James |
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9b2c9cb
|
There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend's money to your own satisfaction and his benefit.
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P.D. James |
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620b9d9
|
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.
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|
murder
pd-james
the-murder-room
|
P.D. James |
|
fb36d41
|
I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people's.
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|
P.D. James |
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6bcbf87
|
They also accused her of being sardonic, and although there was uncertainty about the meaning of the word, they knew that it was not a desirable quality in a woman, being one which gentlemen particularly disliked.
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P.D. James |
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b0e227b
|
Henry James's definition of the purpose of a novel: "To help the human heart to know itself."
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P.D. James |
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841cff0
|
The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.
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P.D. James |
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acbb32d
|
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.
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P.D. James |
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c2aecef
|
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.
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P.D. James |
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29e33c1
|
Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure, but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge.
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|
P.D. James |
|
9eeb3b8
|
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.
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|
metropolis
soho
city-life
london
|
P.D. James |
|
14e07c9
|
The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.
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|
P.D. James |
|
f6d87c5
|
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.
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|
past-and-present
|
P.D. James |