128 Quotes by P. D. James

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

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.

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

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

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?

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

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

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.