128 Quotes by P. D. James

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.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

we live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving ...

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.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

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

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

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.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.