Devices and Desires Quotes

“He said: “It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it’s probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.” They”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure, but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge.”
― P.D. James, Devices and Desires

“Suicide is an extraordinary phenomenon. The result is irrevocable. Extinction. The end of all choice.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it’s probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we feel in control.”
― P.D. James, Devices and Desires

“exceptionally bright. It was”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Relative poverty, but that, of course, is what poverty is.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Sometimes the very old seem to have moved beyond that kind of fear. The trivial upsets of daily living assume importance but the big tragedies they take in their stride.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote: ‘We have at times to be willing to be guilty.’ Well, I’m willing to be guilty.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“And to die in one’s sleep without distress to oneself or inconvenience to others is an enviable end.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“The dead are beyond harm, the harm they do and the harm that is done to them.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“It’s what you do to the living that takes the strong emotions, courage, hatred and love.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“The sky too was turbulent, the stars bright but very high, the moon reeling frantically between the shredded clouds like a blown lantern of frail paper.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Knowledge always brings responsibility;”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“But how can we be sure that what we’re hearing isn’t our own voice, our own subconscious desires? The message we listen for so carefully must be mediated through our own experience, our personality, our heredity, our inner needs. Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Pascoe, for all his liberal ideas, is as ready as the next man to believe that a woman who persists in not wanting to go to bed with him must be either frigid or a lesbian.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Far more marvellous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined. Why do poets of the present not speak of it?”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Timor mortis conturbat me. He thought: In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural, whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Or did extreme old age free one from all such petty considerations of vanity or self-esteem as the mind gradually distanced itself from the devices and desires of the flesh?”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“He found himself wondering, as he had before in his life, at man’s insistent need for ritual, for the formal acknowledgement of each rite of passage.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“At the heart of the universe there is cruelty. We are predators and are preyed upon, every living thing.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Or would it resist even time and the North Sea and still be standing when the final darkness fell over the planet? In his more pessimistic moments some rogue part of his mind knew this darkness to be inevitable, although he did not expect it to come in his time, maybe not even in his son’s.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“one more indication of the firm British conviction, not uncommon in more elevated if less useful spheres of human activity, that there is nothing so fatal to success as knowing your subject. It”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires

“Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?” “It’s vital. If a child has it for the first ten years, hardly anything else matters. If he hasn’t, then nothing does.”
― P.D. James, Devices And Desires