Top 140 P.D. James Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.”

— P.D. James

3. “Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.”

— P.D. James

4. “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

5. “All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.”

— P.D. James

6. “Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.”

— P.D. James

7. “I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.”

— P.D. James

8. “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

9. “A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don’t actually believe it.”

— P.D. James

10. “In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.”

— P.D. James

11. “When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?”

— P.D. James

12. “A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.”

— P.D. James

13. “Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.”

— P.D. James

14. “Don’t just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.”

— P.D. James

15. “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.”

— P.D. James

16. “Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.”

— P.D. James

17. “I don’t want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”

— P.D. James

18. “What a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give.”

— P.D. James

19. “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

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

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Time didn’t heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.”

— P.D. James

25. “We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.”

— P.D. James

26. “Wars may be fought by decent men, but they’re not won by them.”

— P.D. James

27. “Old age makes caricatures of us all.”

— P.D. James

28. “Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.”

— P.D. James

29. “For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn’t believe that, I don’t think I could go on living.”

— P.D. James

30. “Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”

— P.D. James

31. “What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

33. “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

34. “Every island to a child is a treasure island.”

— P.D. James

35. “Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”

— P.D. James

36. “Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.”

— P.D. James

37. “Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.”

— P.D. James

38. “Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?”

— P.D. James

39. “There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can’t now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.”

— P.D. James

40. “The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.”

— P.D. James

41. “It’s easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It’s only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.”

— P.D. James

42. “We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.”

— P.D. James

43. “First-class travel, provided one hasn’t to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life’s luxuries.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

45. “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

46. “The great tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.”

— P.D. James

47. “Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn’t false.”

— P.D. James

48. “Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

50. “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, if only to preserve your sanity.”

— P.D. James