P. D. James
A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.Collection: Men
It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.Collection: Stars
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.Collection: Life
Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.Collection: Ambition
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.Collection: Morning
Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.Collection: People
Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.Collection: May
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.Collection: Looks
The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.Collection: Alzheimer's
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Childhood
A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.Collection: Healthy
Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.Collection: War
Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.Collection: Love Always
History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.Collection: Past
you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.Collection: Nothing But The Truth
Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.Collection: People
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.Collection: Peculiar
He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?Collection: Love You
No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.Collection: Government
A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.Collection: Prejudice