P. D. James Quotes

When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliation of every fault. We recollect a thousand endearments, which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed; and wish, vainly wish, for his return, not so much that we may receive as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

All of my best friends are dead people. Someday I've got to figure out how that happened.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Eulogy is nice, but one does not learn anything from it.

I think whenever you lose somebody close to you, there's always a part of you that wishes you could have done something differently.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.

I lost my wife Barbara to cancer few years ago. I would give whatever time I have left to spend one more day with her.

The grave is a crucible where memory is purified; we only remember a dead friend by those qualities which make him regretted.

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.

When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something...I don't know...even an earring

Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?

The cold, the changed, perchance the dead, anew, The mourn'd, the loved, the lost,-too many, yet how few!

Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman.

Funerals...are for the living.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don't.

I'm always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I'm listening to it.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?