to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is… — P. D. James Copy Share Image
Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe. — P. D. James Copy Share Image
What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it. — P. D. James Copy Share Image
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic? — P. D. James Copy Share Image
If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well… — P. D. James Copy Share Image
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order. — P. D. James Copy Share Image
It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out,… — P. D. James Copy Share Image
Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead. — P. D. James Copy Share Image
If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk. — P. D. James Copy Share Image
read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the… — P. D. James Copy Share Image
In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age… — P. D. James Copy Share Image
It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed. — P. D. James Copy Share Image
