P. D. James
P. D. James
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 August 1920
dying remember cease
A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
letters spontaneous individual
No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
children brave secret
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.
memories past fiction
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 not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
charity dull helping
we live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving ...
childhood prison appeals
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.
father equality skills
[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
hands doctors life-and-death
If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.
personality doe affinity
Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.
skulls skins facts
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
faith teaching people
The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.
forgiveness long forgiving
we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
ambition possibility ifs
Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.
believe law people
All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.