The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories Quotes

“Bereavement is like a serious illness. One dies or one survives, and the medicine is time, not a change of scene.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“The figure who leaps from the side of the road in the darkness of a winter afternoon, frantically waving down the approaching motorist, is so much the creature of fiction that when it happened to the newly promoted Sergeant Adam Dalgliesh his first thought was that he had somehow become involved in one of those Christmas short stories written to provide a seasonal frisson for the readers of an upmarket weekly magazine.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“Although most of my own work has been as a novelist, I have greatly enjoyed the challenge of the short story. Much has to be achieved with limited means. There is not spacefor long and detailed descriptions of place, but the setting must still come alivefor the reader. Characterisation is as important as in the novel, but the essentialsof a personality must be established with an economy of words. The plot must be strongbut not too complex, and the denouement, to which every sentence of the narrative should inexorably lead, must surprise the reader but not leave him feeling cheated. All should command the most ingenious element of the short story: the shock of surprise. The good short story is accordingly difficult to write well, but in this busy ageit can provide one of the most satisfactory reading experiences.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“four Queens of Crime—Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert’s conscience—that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn’t sounded or that he hadn’t heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“Perfect fear casteth out love, thought Gabriel. The aphorism pleased him.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“reinforced my initial prejudice against what, with the intolerance of youth, I thought of as a type.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“had found it difficult to sleep since my husband had been killed, and now I lay rigid under the canopy of the four-poster re-living the extraordinary day, piecing together the anomalies, the small incidents, the clues, to form a satisfying pattern, trying to impose order on disorder. I think that is what I’ve been wanting to do all my life. It was that night at Stutleigh which decided my whole”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience--that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn't sounded or that he hadn't heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories