Top 140 P.D. James Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn’t that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?”

— P.D. James

52. “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.”

— P.D. James

53. “A nation that can’t remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.”

— P.D. James

54. “There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.”

— P.D. James

55. “A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.”

— P.D. James

56. “I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you’ve no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.”

— P.D. James

57. “Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.”

— P.D. James

58. “The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.”

— P.D. James

59. “The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.”

— P.D. James

60. “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.”

— P.D. James

61. “No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

63. “The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven’t a chance of getting.”

— P.D. James

64. “People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?”

— P.D. James

65. “If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.”

— P.D. James

66. “Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

68. “What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.”

— P.D. James

69. “Creativity doesn’t flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.”

— P.D. James

70. “I don’t see why escapist literature shouldn’t also be a work of art.”

— P.D. James

71. “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

72. “In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren’t credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.”

— P.D. James

73. “Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

75. “If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?”

— P.D. James

76. “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

77. “You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?”

— P.D. James

78. “I don’t think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.”

— P.D. James

79. “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.”

— P.D. James

80. “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

81. “Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.”

— P.D. James

82. “Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.”

— P.D. James

83. “Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.”

— P.D. James

84. “Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

86. “I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you’re still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.”

— P.D. James

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

— P.D. James

88. “No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.”

— P.D. James

89. “Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.”

— P.D. James

90. “We are neither of us the people we were then. Let us look on the past only as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.”

— P.D. James

91. “This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble.”

— P.D. James

92. “The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world, but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have.”

— P.D. James

93. “If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don’t you think?”

— P.D. James

94. “There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.”

— P.D. James

95. “But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement. He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility, the yielding up of privacy, the abomination of pain, the glimpses of patient compassion in the faces of friends who knew that their indulgences would not be claimed for long.”

— P.D. James

96. “Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.”

— P.D. James

97. “Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows.”

— P.D. James

98. “Death is like birth, painful, messy and undignified. Most of the time anyway.”

— P.D. James

99. “Henry James’s definition of the purpose of a novel: “To help the human heart to know itself.”

— P.D. James

100. “They also accused her of being sardonic, and although there was uncertainty about the meaning of the word, they knew it was not a desirable quality in a woman, being one which gentlemen particularly disliked.”

— P.D. James