quotes by P.D. James

"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."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

""But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?"

"That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.""
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts."
— P.D. James

"When at last he reached home he went to his bedroom and tried on his equipment for murder. He looked at himself in the long wardrobe glass. With the unsheathed knife in his hand, the raincoat hanging in glistening folds from his thin shoulders, he looked like a surgeon gowned for some desperate operation or, perhaps, like the member of a more ancient and sinister priesthood garbed for a ritual slaughter. And yet the image was not wholly terrifying. There was something wrong about it, something almost pathetic. The clothes were right, the naked knife showed the keen edge of fear; but the eyes which met his with their look of milk, almost painful resolution were the eyes not of an executioner but of the victim."
— P.D. James (Innocent Blood)

"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."
— P.D. James

"It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life."
— P.D. James

"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."
— P.D. James

"It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one."
— P.D. James (Original Sin)