P. D. James Quotes
Most popular P. D. James Quotes
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil.
A cup of tea, the British specific against disaster, grief and shock.
Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed.
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion, and fear.
Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.
Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.
If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
Gossip...was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
Jealousy, he thought, was as physical as fear; the same dryness of the mouth, the thudding heart, the restlessness which destroyed appetite and peace.
He said that was one of the things he deplored about the loss of religion, it meant that people elevated politics into a religious faith and that was dangerous.
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.
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.
