"Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

"We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"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

"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)

"Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much."
— P.D. James (Innocent Blood)

"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)

"It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it."
— P.D. James

"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

"I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

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

"I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be hand only if they persevere."
— 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)

"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

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

"People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?"
— P.D. James (Innocent Blood)

"Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

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

"History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species. "
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"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."
— P.D. James

"What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give."
— P.D. James

"All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction."
— P.D. James

"Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

"Every island to a child is a treasure island."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

"Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

"The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted. "
— P.D. James (Innocent Blood)

"Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

"Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity."
— P.D. James (Innocent Blood)

"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)