Home > Work > Devices and Desires (Adam Dalgliesh #8)
1 " The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence. "
― P.D. James , Devices and Desires (Adam Dalgliesh #8)
2 " Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure, but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge. "
3 " He said: “It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it’s probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.” They "
4 " Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?” “It’s vital. If a child has it for the first ten years, hardly anything else matters. If he hasn’t, then nothing does. "
5 " We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we feel in control. "
6 " Suicide is an extraordinary phenomenon. The result is irrevocable. Extinction. The end of all choice. "
7 " It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it’s probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity. "
8 " Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote: ‘We have at times to be willing to be guilty.’ Well, I’m willing to be guilty. "
9 " exceptionally bright. It was "
10 " He found himself wondering, as he had before in his life, at man’s insistent need for ritual, for the formal acknowledgement of each rite of passage. "
11 " Or did extreme old age free one from all such petty considerations of vanity or self-esteem as the mind gradually distanced itself from the devices and desires of the flesh? "
12 " Timor mortis conturbat me. He thought: In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural, whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend. "
13 " Far more marvellous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined. Why do poets of the present not speak of it? "
14 " one more indication of the firm British conviction, not uncommon in more elevated if less useful spheres of human activity, that there is nothing so fatal to success as knowing your subject. It "
15 " Relative poverty, but that, of course, is what poverty is. "
16 " And to die in one’s sleep without distress to oneself or inconvenience to others is an enviable end. "
17 " But how can we be sure that what we’re hearing isn’t our own voice, our own subconscious desires? The message we listen for so carefully must be mediated through our own experience, our personality, our heredity, our inner needs. Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear? "
18 " Knowledge always brings responsibility; "
19 " The sky too was turbulent, the stars bright but very high, the moon reeling frantically between the shredded clouds like a blown lantern of frail paper. "
20 " Pascoe, for all his liberal ideas, is as ready as the next man to believe that a woman who persists in not wanting to go to bed with him must be either frigid or a lesbian. "
