Time & Perspective Quote by P. D. James

It lands like a cold joke told in a sterile room: even God, the ultimate omnipotent tinkerer, eventually has to cut losses. P. D. James isn’t offering a pep talk about resilience; she’s puncturing the romantic myth of the scientist as pure rational hero and, by extension, the comforting idea that intelligence guarantees control. The line works because it grants scientific ambition its grandest possible scale, then yanks it back to the most human of gestures: admitting failure and moving on.

The sly heresy of “even God” does double duty. It flatters the scientist’s hubris (your work is so consequential it belongs in the same sentence as divinity) while also indicting it (your work is still fallible, still subject to limits, still capable of becoming a moral and practical liability). “Write off” is the killer phrase: it’s accounting language, bureaucratic and unsentimental, implying a spreadsheet view of life where a botched trial, a ruined specimen, or a compromised human subject becomes a sunk cost. In a James novel, that chill matters. Her worlds are filled with institutions - labs, hospitals, police forces, governments - that launder ethical decisions through procedure.

Contextually, James often circles the modern anxiety that expertise doesn’t dissolve tragedy; it systematizes it. The subtext is a warning: persistence is not inherently virtuous. Sometimes the most responsible act is termination, not triumph - and the hardest part is recognizing when your “experiment” has quietly turned into collateral damage.