Quotes by P.D. James

“I don’t think He bargains.”“Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to he just. If He wants belief He’d better pr...”

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

“I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always ha...”

“…It was embarrassing now to recall with what little regret he had let slip his pleasures and preoccupations, the imminence of loss revealing them for what they were, at best only a solace, at worst...”

“Before he turned again the to the car his eye was caught by a small clump of unknown flowers. The pale pinkish white heads rose from a mossy pad on top of the wall and trembled delicately in the li...”

“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.”

“What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thi...”

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

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

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

“What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.”

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

“Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that ...”

“(A murderer about their victim:)"He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.”

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

“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.”

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