P.D. James

No one was about, yet he seemed to sense the presence of watching eyes behind blank windows.

I don't want to kill you.

What condemned a man [in a police investigation] was the inability to keep his mouth shut.

His face was a mask betraying nothing.

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.

"It isn't what you suspect, it's what you can prove that counts."

"Are you sorry about Isabelle leaving?"

"I am rather. Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense. I could never quite accept that Isabelle was what she is: a generous, indolent, over-affectionate and stupid young woman. I thought that any woman as beautiful as she must have an instinct about life, access to some secret wisdom which is beyond cleverness. Every time she opened that delicious mouth I was expecting her to illumine life. I think I could have spent all my life just looking at her and waiting for the oracle. And all she could talk about was clothes."

To enjoy the sole attention of one agreeable man and no attention at all from anyone else was all she ever hoped from a party.

Cordelia read the inscription carved deep on the headstone. "At rest": the commonest epitaph of a generation to whom rest must have seemed the ultimate luxury, the supreme benediction.

"It's a nice stone, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is. I was admiring the lettering."

"Cut deep, that is. It cost a mint of money but it was worth it. That'll last, you see. Half the lettering here won't, it's that shallow. It takes the pleasure out of a cemetery. I like to read the grave stones, like to know who people were and when they died and how long the women lived after they buried their men. It sets you wondering how they managed and whether they were lonely. There's no use in a stone if you can't read the lettering."