Quotes by Civil Servants

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.
P.D. James
A misleading impression not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.
Sir Robert Armstrong
Blessed are they who heal us of self-despisings. Of all services which can be done to man I know of none more precious.
William Hale White
No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't fake.
P.D. James
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P.D. James
SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field.
P.D. James
Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows.
P.D. James
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
P.D. James
The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.
P.D. James
You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.
P.D. James
But because day at her dawning hours hath so bewitched me, must I yet love her when glutted with triumph she settles to garish noon? . . . Who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star.
E.R. Eddison
We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.
P.D. James
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
P.D. James
When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action is clear in mind when I start -- so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing it seems almost physically from my brain down the arm to my moving hand that they begin to live and move and have their being and assume a different kind of truth.
P.D. James
(A murderer about their victim:)"He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.
P.D. James
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
P.D. James
Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence.
P.D. James
All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.
P.D. James
What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
P.D. James
The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.
P.D. James
I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.
P.D. James
Surely,” he said, “the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom’s fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the lightning’s fiery feet, the frost that shattereth, the rain that shroudeth, the snow that putteth about their nakedness a softer coverlet than fine lawn.
E.R. Eddison
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P.D. James
There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.
P.D. James
I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn't anything to do with being young
P.D. James
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
P.D. James
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
Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.
P.D. James
There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.
P.D. James
Thunder and blood and night must usurp our parts, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.
E.R. Eddison
These things hath Fate brought to pass, and we be but Fate's whipping-tops bandied what way she will.
E.R. Eddison
What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...""What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh."Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.""A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.
P.D. James
Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
P.D. James
Your advice seems a little ironical.""Oh, you may either follow it or reverse it—that is its chief beauty. It is equally good taken either way.
Thomas Henry Lister
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
P.D. James
…It was embarrassing now to recall with what little regret he had let slip his pleasures and preoccupations, the imminence of loss revealing them for what they were, at best only a solace, at worst a trivial squandering of time and energy. Now he had to lay hold of them again and believe that they were important, at least to himself. He doubted whether he would ever again believe them important to other people.
P.D. James
Before he turned again the to the car his eye was caught by a small clump of unknown flowers. The pale pinkish white heads rose from a mossy pad on top of the wall and trembled delicately in the light breeze. Dalgliesh walked over and stood stock still, regarding in silence their unpretentious beauty. He smelt for the first time the clean half-illusory salt tang of the sea. The air moved warm and gentle against his skin. He was suddenly suffused with happiness and, as always in these rare transitory moments, intrigued by the pure physical nature of his joy. It moved along his veins, a gentle effervescence. Even to analyse its nature was to lose hold of it. But he recognized it for what it was, the first clear intimation since his illness that life could be good.
P.D. James
Surely time past is gone by like a shadow.
E.R. Eddison
I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
P.D. James
What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.
P.D. James
She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.
P.D. James
Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them.
P.D. James
Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.
P.D. James
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
P.D. James
The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.
P.D. James
I don’t think He bargains.”“Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to he just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.’“That He exists?”“That He cares.
P.D. James
You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.
P.D. James
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.
P.D. James
He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world. Though hast my sword. Strike. Death shall be a sweet rest to me. Thraldom, not death, should terrify me.
E.R. Eddison
It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
P.D. James
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
P.D. James
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P.D. James
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P.D. James
Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.
P.D. James
What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'Then we haven't got sound government.
P.D. James
I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
P.D. James
Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P.D. James
Where were all heroical parts but in Helteranius? and a man might make a garment for the moon sooner than fit the o'erleaping actions of great Jalcanaius, who now leaveth but his body to bedung that earth that was lately shaken at his terror. I have waded in red blood to the knee; and in this hour, in my old years, the world is become for me a vision only and a mock-show.
E.R. Eddison
This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.
E.R. Eddison
The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.
P.D. James