Top 140 P.D. James Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Henry James’s definition of the purpose of a novel: “To help the human heart to know itself.”

— P.D. James

102. “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

103. “Human beings have an irresistible urge towards self-sacrifice. They die for any reason or none at all, for meaningless abstractions like patriotism, justice, peace; for other men’s ideals, for other men’s power, for a few feet of earth.”

— P.D. James

104. “Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren’s home life wasn’t greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.”

— P.D. James

105. “We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.”

— P.D. James

106. “Sin duda es importante que los que se aman sean capaces de hablar abierta y sinceramente sobre las cuestiones que les afectan.”

— P.D. James

107. “Nothing and no one will separate us, not life nor death, nor principalities, nor powers, nor anything that is of the heavens nor anything that is of the earth.”

— P.D. James

108. “The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than Homo sapiens.”

— P.D. James

109. “Certainly his was the infectious good nature of a man who necessarily finds the world an agreeable place since it contains himself.”

— P.D. James

110. “It is interesting how often unintelligent, even stupid, women manage their emotional lives more satisfactorily than do their cleverer sisters.”

— P.D. James

111. “I used to think that we can have almost anything we want from life, that it’s just a question of organization. But now I’m beginning to think that we have to make a choice more often than we’d like. The important thing is to make sure that it’s our choice, no one else’s, and that we make it honestly. But one thing I’m sure of is that it’s never a good thing to make a decision when you’re not absolutely well.”

— P.D. James

112. “Darcy took the view that if family amity required him to meet people with whom he had little in common, it were best done at their expense not his.”

— P.D. James

113. “Almost the whole of modern medical research is dedicated to improving health in old age and extending the human life-span and we get more senility, not less. Extending it for what? We give them drugs to improve short-term memory, drugs to raise mood, drugs to increase appetite. They don’t need anything to make them sleep, that’s all they seem to do. What, I wonder, goes on in those senile minds during those long periods of half-consciousness. Memories, I suppose, prayers.”

— P.D. James

114. “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

115. “He and Darcy rapidly came to the conclusion that they liked each other and thereafter, as is common with friends, accepted their different quirks of character as evidence of the other’s superior intellect.”

— P.D. James

116. “The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.”

— P.D. James

117. “Suicide is an extraordinary phenomenon. The result is irrevocable. Extinction. The end of all choice.”

— P.D. James

118. “You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.”

— P.D. James

119. “When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action is clear in mind when I start – so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing it seems almost physically from my brain down the arm to my moving hand that they begin to live and move and have their being and assume a different kind of truth.”

— P.D. James

120. “It was a fashionable and expensive academy but there was no loving care, and it inculcated pride and the values of the fashionable world, not sound learning and good sense.”

— P.D. James

121. “She would not wish anyone violently dead but, since it had happened, one might as well make the most of it.”

— P.D. James

122. “We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they’re small and mean enough so that we feel in control.”

— P.D. James

123. “The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.”

— P.D. James

124. “What it was he had chiefly gained: a fascination with the complexity of the intellectual bastions which men could construct to withstand the tides of disbelief. His own disbelief had remained unshaken.”

— P.D. James

125. “The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife’s feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn’t tainted with guilt and regret.”

— P.D. James

126. “She always did what was correct. Fallon did what was right.”

— P.D. James

127. “Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.”

— P.D. James

128. “The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.”

— P.D. James

129. “We were polluting the planet with our numbers; if we were breeding less it was to be welcomed.”

— P.D. James

130. “She thought that he was probably a man who could never imagine himself at a disadvantage in any company since he was secure in his private world, possessed of that core of inner self-esteem which is the basis of happiness.”

— P.D. James

131. “Charlotte had not been the eldest of a large family without acquiring some skill in the management of male delinquencies and her method with her husband was ingenious. She consistently congratulated him on qualities that he did not possess in the hope that, flattered by her praise and approval, he would acquire them.”

— P.D. James

132. “People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.”

— P.D. James

133. “It is generally accepted that divine service affords a legitimate opportunity for the congregation to assess not only the appearance, deportment, elegance and possible wealth of new arrivals to the parish, but the demeanour of any of their neighbours known to be in an interesting situation, ranging from pregnancy to bankruptcy.”

— P.D. James

134. “There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.”

— P.D. James

135. “I like to read the gravestones, like to know who people were and when they died and how long the women lived after they buried their men. It sets you wondering how they managed and whether they were lonely.”

— P.D. James

136. “There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend’s money to your own satisfaction and his benefit.”

— P.D. James

137. “People, like countries, needed someone weaker and more vulnerable than themselves to bully and despise.”

— P.D. James

138. “It was a well-known witticism that you had to be exceptionally sane to be accepted for treatment at the Steen.”

— P.D. James

139. “If you stood apart long enough, weren’t you in danger of stifling, perhaps even losing, that quickening spirit which the priests here would call the soul?”

— P.D. James

140. “Bereavement is like a serious illness. One dies or one survives, and the medicine is time, not a change of scene.”

— P.D. James