P.D. James > Quotes

“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, The Children of Men

“Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.”
― P.D. James, Innocent Blood

“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“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, The Lighthouse

“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”
― P.D. James, A Taste for Death

“I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“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, The Children of Men

“Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.”
― P.D. James

“Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.”
― P.D. James

“But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?"

"That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“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, Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights

“The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”
― P.D. James

“It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.”
― P.D. James

“Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.”
― P.D. James, Original Sin

“Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.”
― P.D. James, The Murder Room

“Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”
― P.D. James

“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, The Children of Men

“It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.”
― P.D. James

“Every island to a child is a treasure island.”
― P.D. James, The Lighthouse

“I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.”
― P.D. James

“History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species. ”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“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, The Children of Men

“Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men