“Marriage is both the most public and the most secret of institutions, its miseries as irritatingly insistent as a hacking cough, its private malaise less easily diagnosed. And nothing is so destructive as unhappiness to social life. No one wants to sit in embarrassed silence while his host and hostess demonstrate their mutual incompatibility and dislike.”
Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2017, p. 133
Sleep no more: Six Murderous Tales, published posthumously in 2017
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P. D. James 26
English crime writer 1920–2014Related quotes

The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

“Just a moment ago nature put on one of its most spectacular demonstrations.”
Power Of The Plus Factor (1987)
Context: Just a moment ago nature put on one of its most spectacular demonstrations. The widest rainbow I have ever seen stretched from the lake over a high snow-clad mountain to touch down in a deep valley in the Alps. There was about this gigantic rainbow a deep benediction of peace and hope. But as ineffable as nature is in the effect of natural beauty on the mind, it cannot match the peace of God in its healing effect on the human mind. <!-- p. 180

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“One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..”
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Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.