“If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“find depressing his determination to make his characters suffer even when a little common sense on both his part and theirs could avoid it. Tess is one of the most irritating young women in Victorian fiction. Won”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
P.D. James
Born place: in Oxford, The United Kingdom
Born date August 3, 1920
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“Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
Th' unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.
The gods confound - hear me, you good gods all -
Th' Athenians both within and out that wall!
And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow
To the whole race of mankind, high and low!
Amen.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Timon of Athens
“Ian chuckled. “You know what the world’s greatest oxymoron is?” “Happily married,” Sid said wearily.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, quote from Great North Road
“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
Life would split asunder without them. "Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers...." These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet... when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, limited, so soon dealt out to us - drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt. "Try to penetrate" for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps- who know? - we might talk by the way.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“You love me,” he declared.
“With everything that I am,” Elle confirmed, his eyes closed slowly and his arms squeezed her tight.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Fairytale Come Alive
“Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
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The Widow of the Sou...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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