P.D. James

Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not Governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future.

How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos.

A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition.

I don't think God bargains.

They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?

Was there a place for him in this modern world, where systems mattered more than people?

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.

I didn't love him, but I liked him being in love with me.

If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

"My mother used to say, 'Don't marry for money, but marry where money is! ' There's no harm in looking for money as long as there's kindness as well."

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.