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P.D. James Quotes | Quotes said by P.D. James

  • P.D. James Quote #1

    (A murderer about their victim:)

    He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.


  • P.D. James Quote #2

    (Did you love your wife) I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she did not have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.

  • P.D. James Quote #3

    Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

  • P.D. James Quote #4

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #5

    All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

  • P.D. James Quote #6

    Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.

  • P.D. James Quote #7

    Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.

  • P.D. James Quote #8

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #9

    Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

  • P.D. James Quote #10

    Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

  • P.D. James Quote #11

    Every island to a child is a treasure island.

  • P.D. James Quote #12

    Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

  • P.D. James Quote #13

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #14

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #15

    I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn't anything to do with being young

  • P.D. James Quote #16

    I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

  • P.D. James Quote #17

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #18

    I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

  • P.D. James Quote #19

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #20

    If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

  • P.D. James Quote #21

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #22

    It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

  • P.D. James Quote #23

    It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

  • P.D. James Quote #24

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #25

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

  • P.D. James Quote #26

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #27

    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.

  • P.D. James Quote #28

    Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.

  • P.D. James Quote #29

    Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

  • P.D. James Quote #30

    One does not kill to avoid social inconvenience.

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