P. D. James Quotes

To enjoy the sole attention of one agreeable man and no attention at all from anyone else was all she ever hoped from a party.

But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis.

He had disciplined his mind not to speculate; speculation in advance of the facts was always futile and could be dangerous.

They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?

How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty [i.e. in one's wife]. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn't possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being.

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

I always had a sceptical and slightly morbid caste of mind, so my first response to Humpty Dumpty was "Did he fall or was he pushed?" I was drawn to the macabre, and for some reason I was very interested, from earliest childhood, in death. I seemed to think about it a great deal. It may have been something to do with the war, which overshadowed my childhood. My father talked about it a lot. It was like a great universal pain.

I don't see why escapist literature should not also be a work of art.

Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous.

Because English is spoken and written in so many forms for a variety of purposes throughout the world it is surely important that English in its highest form should be taught, spoken and valued in this country. Yet few would deny that standards of written and spoken English are in decline among all sections of the community and that we are in real danger of becoming an illiterate society.

I didn't love him, but I liked him being in love with me.

No one was about, yet he seemed to sense the presence of watching eyes behind blank windows.

Violent death, like most disasters, afforded its satisfactions to those who were neither victim nor suspect.

But what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can't love one another?

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 be just. If he wants belief He'd better provide some evidence.