Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

[on Purgatory] It is, of course, open to anyone to say that the whole idea is morbid and exaggerated
open even to those who think nothing of queuing for twenty-four hours in acute discomfort to see the first night of a musical comedy, which lasts three hours at most, which they are not sure of liking when they get there, and which they could see any other night with no trouble at all.

To know one's own limitations is the hallmark of competence.

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.
"Well, Eve
it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.

God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

Make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken.
"My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?"
"There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent.

It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.

There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing-perhaps in particular if we learned nothing-our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.

Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot. The creation is not a product of the matter and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitations of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree form to create a table form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to creation out of nothing, and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: "God created the world by imagination.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

This effect would be increased by extraneous circumstances producing other familiar physical sensations - night, cold or the rattling of heavy traffic, for instance." "Yes." "Yes. The old wounds are nearly healed, but not quite. The ordinary exercise of your mental faculties has no bad effect. It is only when you excite the injured part of your brain." "Yes, I see." "Yes. You must avoid these occasions. You must learn to be irresponsible, Lord Peter." "My friends say I'm only too irresponsible already." "Very likely. A sensitive nervous temperament often appears so, owing to its mental nimbleness." "Oh!

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.

Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.

Bunter: "I assure your lordship that for the firsttime in my existence I regret that I have made no practical study of campanology."
Wimsey: "I am always so delighted to find that there are things you cannot do.

Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person."
"That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said."
"All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it."
"But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.

If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.

Every great man has a woman behind him ... And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.

The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself

To obey orders in this family has been my privilege for the last twenty years--a privilege which has been an unqualified pleasure, except perhaps when connected with the photography of deceased persons in an imperfect state of preservation.

There is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

Nothing is more cruel to the young than to tell them that the world is made for youth.

No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.

I know when I am well off. You had better come up to me.' 'You know I can't.' 'Of course you can't. You can only go down and down.' 'Are you trying to insult me?' 'Yes, but it's very difficult.

Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque.

in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.

It is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that 'a woman has done it - yah!' The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.

She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.

I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said:

"D'you like your job?"

The detective considered the question, and replied:

"Yes - yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well - not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there's a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?"

"Oh, nothing," said Peter. "It's a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it - up to a point. If it was all on paper I'd enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job - when one doesn't know any of the people and it's just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do.

Christendom and heathendom now stand face to face ... At bottom is a violent and irreconcilable quarrel about the nature of God and the nature of an and the ultimate nature of the universe; it is a war of dogma.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

And you, Mary, if you must run off to London, why do it in that unfinished manner, so that I was left without the car, and couldn't catch anything until the midnight train at Northallerton? It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things.

God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it's experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense "makes it good."

I will say here and now that I have never discovered, nor can I see, any reasonable use or excuse for the " waynee, weedee, weekee " convention. It is not merely that I have a profound sympathy with one of my friends who says he just cannot believe that Caesar was the kind of man to talk in that kind of way. Caesar may, indeed, have done so, but what then ?

As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom.

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.

And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.

I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about
but in the end it left him worse of."
But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.

The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling
it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt.

Is not the great defect of our education today - a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned - that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.

Very well. Now, if you stimulate those damaged places in your brain again, you run the risk of opening up the old wounds. I mean, that if you get nerve-sensations of any kind producing the reactions which we call horror, fear, and sense of responsibility, they may go on to make disturbance right along the old channel, and produce in their turn physical changes which you will call by the names you were accustomed to associate with them - dread of German mines, responsibility for the lives of your men, strained attention and the inability to distinguish small sounds through the overpowering noise of guns." "I

Perhaps you didn't say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots - dreadful things!'
'Yes,' said the Duchess, 'he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, dear, it does sound a little rude.

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.

Peter: Oy!
Harriet: Hullo!
Peter: I just wanted to ask whether you'd given any further thought to that suggestion about marrying me.
Harriet (sarcastically) : I suppose you were thinking how delightful it would be to go through life together like this?
Peter: Well, not quite like this. Hand in hand was more my idea.
Harriet: What is that in your hand?
Peter: A dead starfish.
Harriet: Poor fish!
Peter: No ill-feeling, I trust?
Harriet: Oh, dear no.

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behaviour at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad together.

Now for the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, 'make people good by Act of Parliament', just because laws are man-made and therefore partake of the imperfect and self-contradictory nature of man. Humanly speaking, it is not true at all that 'truly to know the good is to do the good'; it is far truer to say with St. Paul that 'the evil that I would not, that I do'; so that the mere increase of knowledge is of very little help in the struggle to outl

And by the way, my dear,' he said, 'you might just mention to Mrs. Sutton that if she must read the morning paper before I come down, I should be obliged if she would fold it neatly afterwards.'
'What an old fuss-box you are, darling,' said his wife.
Mr. Mummery sighed. He could not explain that it was somehow important that the morning paper should come to him fresh and prim, like a virgin.
Women did not feel these things. ("Suspicion")

They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm.

A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Oh, yes," said Lord Peter. He watched the cool fingers, fascinated, and the steady approach of the needle. "Yes - I've had it before - and, d'you know - I don't care frightfully about it." He had brought up his right hand, and it closed over the surgeon's wrist like a vise. The silence was like a shock. The blue eyes did not waver; they burned down steadily upon the heavy white lids below them. Then these slowly lifted; the grey eyes met the blue - coldly, steadily - and held them. When

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, "Yes, yes, very good, very true - that's just what I'm always saying." I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.

Now, it is frequently asserted that, with women, the job does not come first. What (people cry) are women doing with this liberty of theirs? What woman really prefers a job to a home and family? Very few, I admit. It is unfortunate that they should so often have to make the choice. A man does not, as a rule, have to choose. He gets both. Nevertheless, there have been women ... who had the choice, and chose the job and made a success of it. And there have been and are many men who have sacrificed their careers for women ... When it comes to a choice, then every man or woman has to choose as an individual human being, and, like a human being, take the consequences.

In every age, art holds up to us the standard pattern of exemplary conduct, and real life does its best to conform.

As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them ... a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual.

That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.

Even if it is the twilight of the world, before night falls I will sleep in your arms.' ...

Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.

You can always turn a tragedy into a comedy by sitting down.

And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol.
It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle

The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do"
"Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

My idea is that Miss Vane didn't do it," said Wimsey. "I dare say that's an idea which has already occurred to you, but with the weight of my great mind behind it, no doubt it strikes the imagination more forcibly.

But even a watched pot cannot absorb heat for ever.

That there is a secret itself is a secret.

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along - and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.

A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

Thank God!' said Wimsey. 'Where there is a church, there is civilisation.

While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.

Mr. Copley, feeling as though his head were filled with hard knobs of spinning granite that crashed with sickening thuds against his brainpan, walked stiffly away to his own quarters. As

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.

It is always reasonably easy to get conversation going in a pub, and it will be a black day for detectives when beer is abolished. After

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.

Miss Climpson," said Lord Peter, "is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity, Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers' money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you.

Mr. Bredon had been a week with Pym's Publicity, and had learnt a number of things. He learned the average number of words that can be crammed into four inches of copy; that Mr. Armstrong's fancy could be caught by an elaborately-drawn lay-out, whereas Mr. Hankin looked on art-work as waste of a copy-writer's time; that the word "pure" was dangerous, because, if lightly used, it laid the client open to prosecution by the Government inspectors, whereas the words "highest quality," "finest ingredients," "packed under the best conditions" had no legal meaning, and were therefore safe; that the expression "giving work to umpteen thousand British employees in our model works at so-and-so" was not by any means the same thing as "British made throughout"; that the north of England liked its butter and margarine salted, whereas the south preferred it fresh; that the Morning Star would not accept any advertisements containing the word "cure," though there was no objection to such expressions as "relieve" or "ameliorate," and that, further, any commodity that professed to "cure" anything might find itself compelled to register as a patent medicine and use an expensive stamp; that the most convincing copy was always written with the tongue in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity's worth producing - for some reason - poverty and flatness of style; that if, by the most far-fetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning tha

She could have made a much better thing of that, if she had not been afraid of giving herself away. What hampered her was this sense of being in the middle of things, too close to things, pressed upon and bullied by reality. If she could succeed in standing aside from herself she would achieve self-confidence and a better control.

The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.

The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.

By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?

Why would you family think about it?"
"Oh, my mother's the only one that counts, and she likes you very much from what she's seen of you."
"So you had me inspected?"
"No-dash ti all, I seem to be saying all the wrong things today. I was absolutely stunned that first day in court, and I rushed off to my mater, who's an absolute dear, and the kind of person who really understands things, and I said, 'Look here! here's the absolutely one and only woman, and she's being put through a simply ghastly awful business and for God's sake come and hold my hand!' You simply don't know how foul it was.

He has the valuable quality of being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.

Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that 'Bridegroom' imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort of thing doesn't make much appeal to well-balanced women, who look on it as just another example of men's hopeless romanticism about sex, and who are apt either to burst out laughing or sniff a faint smell of drains.

It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every week-end grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other's exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides.

There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest.

I often think when a man's once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.

The glass-blower's cat is bompstable, said Mr. Parker aloud and distinctly.