Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night Quotes

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The heaviest restriction upon the freedom of public opinion is not the official censorship of the Press, but the unofficial censorship by a Press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death! ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

We are so made that we soon grow weary of ornament for sake of ornament, and even of beauty that makes no appeal to the heart or the understanding. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I s'pose you couldn't get 'em to bring it in 'Death by the Visitation of God,' could you, Biggs?' suggested Lord Peter. 'Sort of judgment for wantin' to marry into our family, what? ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is.If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

Nobody minds coarseness, but one must draw the line at cruelty


-Lord Peter Wimsey ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

[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. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Hamlet | Act I, Scene III

POLONIUS:
Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee! ~ William Shakespeare

_'You shouldn't say thank you for a good review,' said Harriet. 'That would imply that one had done a favour to the author, whereas one has simply done justice to the book.'_ ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

But we can never hope for a whole jury-box full of ecclesiastical diehards. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Advertise, or go under. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

If the one thing was right, everything elses must surely be right; the thing was axiomatic. It was true that happiness had often to be wooed, pleaded for, struggled for; but he took it for grantetd that a woman was made like that - she did no come halway to meet desire, or if she did, there was something wrong with her. She shrank instinctively from passion, but her shrinking inflamed it in spite of herself; then, when she reluctantly yielded, here compassion prompted her response. No passion without compassion, no compassion without love, so that her passion was proof positive of her loev. Since every act of love was an act of compliance, it was right to be grateful for it - her surrender was so beautiful - an intoxicating compliment that filled one with a perpetual consciousness of achievement. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I think this is an awfully immoral job of ours. I do, really. Think how we spoil the digestions of the public." "Ah, yes - but think how earnestly we strive to put them right again. We undermine 'em with one hand and build 'em with the other. The vitamins we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito, the roughage we remove from Peabody's Piper Parritch we make up into a package and market as Bunbury's Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompayne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice over - once to have its food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands - including you and me. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Do you know how to pick a lock?"
"Not in the least, I'm afraid."
"I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion. ~ Ralph Ellison

The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Most people don't associate anythin'
their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what? ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Dark City Blue is a freight train of a thriller crashing through some madhouse city night while a bomb's ticking down to zero. It's the cage fighting equivalent of a police procedural: violent, gaudy, and packing heat. ~ Trent Jamieson

There are many difficulties inherent in a teleological view of creation, said Parker placidly. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Boil my brains!" said Lord Peter. "Boil 'em and mash 'em and serve 'em up with butter as a dish of turnips, for it's damn well all they're fit for! Look at me! ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine-tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck the surface with a noice like a wet kiss, and vanished instantly. With that instinct which prompts one, when depressed, to wallow in every circumstance of gloom, Peter leaned sadly against the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great war; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I took the liberty of ascertaining as much beforehand, my lord."
"Of course you did, Bunter. You always ascertain everything. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers