152 Quotes by P.D. James

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

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

Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.

To collect me. That is what we can so easily be made to feel at seventy-three; an object, not exactly precious but likely to be brittle, to be carefully collected, conscientiously cared for and as conscientiously returned.

The truth was sometimes more fatal than a lie.

Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.

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

When secrets are unspoken and unwritten they are lodged safely in the mind, but writing them down seems to let them loose and give them the power to spread like pollen on the air and enter into other minds.

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.