Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes & Sayings

Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter Wimsey stretched himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hotel Meurice. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Can I have the heart to fluster the flustered Thipps further - that's very difficult to say quickly - by appearing in a top-hat and frock-coat? I think not. Ten to one he will overlook my trousers and mistake me for the undertaker. A grey suit, I fancy, neat but not gaudy, with a hat to tone, suits my other self better. Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman. — Dorothy L. Sayers

his thoughts revolving silently in this squirrel-cage of mystification. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Herein fail not at your peril. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Harriet looked up. "I did work that out - eventually. But what happened last week seemed to make it quite impossible." "I don't think," said Peter, "you approached the problem - forgive me for saying so - with an unprejudiced mind and undivided attention. Something got between you and the facts." "Miss Vane has been helping me so generously with my books," murmured Miss Lydgate, contritely; "and she has had her own work to do as well. We really ought not to have asked her to spare any time for our problems." "I had plenty of time," said Harriet. "I was only stupid. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Very dangerous things, theories. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Harriet had long ago discovered that one could not like people any the better, merely because they were ill, or dead - still less because one had once liked them very much. — Dorothy L. Sayers

What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration? — Dorothy L. Sayers

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Well-bred English people never have imagination ... — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

Like all male creatures Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It was the room of a woman without taste or moderation, who refused nothing and surrendered nothing, to whom the fact of possession had become the one steadfast reality in a world of loss and change. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' - (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?). — Dorothy L. Sayers

The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody.
Gaudy Night — 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

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 — Dorothy L. Sayers

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 ? — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work. — 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

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


-Lord Peter Wimsey — Dorothy L. Sayers

You had decided to take the action, whatever it was." "Yes." "Yes. It involved perhaps a period of inaction." "Of comparative inaction - yes." "Of suspense, shall we say?" "Yes - of suspense, certainly." "Possibly — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere. — 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

Books ... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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 — Dorothy L. Sayers

It is the dogma that is the drama
not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death
but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe. — Dorothy L. Sayers

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual ... Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It is arguable that when Humanists, "Shook off," as people say, "the trammels of religion," and discovered things of this world as objects of veneration in their own right ... they began to lose the finer appreciation of even the world itself. Thus to the Christian centuries, the flesh was holy (or sacer at least in one sense or the other), and they veiled its awful majesty; to the Humanist centuries it was divine in its own right, and they exhibited it. Now it is the commonplace of the magazine cover. It has lost its numen. So too with the cult of knowledge for its own sake declining from the Revival of Learning to the Brains Trust. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Here am I, sweating my brains out to introduce a really sensational incident into your dull and disreputable little police investigation, and you refuse to show a single spark of enthusiasm. — Dorothy L. Sayers

If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever. — Dorothy L. Sayers

So I think I'd better go, said Wimsey. "I rather wish I hadn't come buttin' into this. some things may be better left alone, don't you think? My sympathies are all in the wrong place and I don't like it. I Know all about not doing evil tha good may come. I'ts doin' good that evil may come that is so embarrassin'."
"My dear boy," said the Rector, "it does not do for us to take too much thought for the morrow. It is better to follow the truth and leave the results in the hand of God. He can forsee where we cannot, because He knows all the facts. — Dorothy L. Sayers

In detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have — Dorothy L. Sayers

But
my dear, my heart is BROKEN! I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything
and he is
THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL!! What is the use of anything? ...
I am absolutely shattered by this Balliol business. Such waste
why couldn't he have been an actor? — Dorothy L. Sayers

The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Harriet grinned at Betty Armstrong, hearing the familiar academic wrangle begin. Before ten minutes had passed, somebody had introduced the word "values." An hour later they were still at it. Finally the Bursar was heard to quote: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." "Oh, bother!" cried the Dean. "Do let's keep mathematics out of it. And physics. I cannot cope with them. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Think of it - all ours, to do as we like with, for as Harold Skimpole so rightly observes, £60 saved is £60 gained, and I'd reckoned on spending it all. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name. — Dorothy L. Sayers

unless you take the view that footballers should be picked on their form as players, and not for personal considerations.' 'Ah!' said Mr Bowles, 'but that's what Vicar would call a counsel of perfection. People talk a lot about the team spirit and let the best side win, but if you was to sit in this bar and listen to what goes on, it's all spite and jealousy, or else it's how to scrape up enough money to entice away some other team's centre-forward, or it's complaints about favouritism or wrong decisions, or something that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The game's not what it was when I was a lad. Too much commercialism, and enough back-biting to stock an old maids' tea-party. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse ... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces? — Dorothy L. Sayers

Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere. — 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

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

In the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction "from the woman's point of view." To such demands, one can only say "Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. — Dorothy L. Sayers

If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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! — Dorothy L. Sayers

He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin. — 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

To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

She is a very conscientious person," said Miss Lydgate, "but she has rather an unfortunate knack of making any subject sound dull. It's a great pity, because she is exceptionally sound and dependable. However, that doesn't greatly matter in her present appointment; she holds a librarianship somewhere - Miss — Dorothy L. Sayers

But if you were investigating a crime," said Lady Swaffham, "you'd have to begin by the usual things, I suppose - finding out what the person had been doing, and who'd been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, yes," said Lord Peter, "but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin' all sorts of inoffensive people. There's lots of people I'd like to murder, wouldn't you?"

"Heaps," said Lady Swaffham. — Dorothy L. Sayers

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Peter! Were you looking for a horse-shoe?"
"No; I was expecting the horse, but the shoe is a piece of pure, gorgeous luck."
"And observation. I found it."
"You did. And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event
one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant sideshow attached to a detective investigation. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular) — Dorothy L. Sayers

To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Passion's a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love's a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can't rein him, it's best to have no truck with him. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Advertise, or go under. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I didn't mind thinking you were a murderer," said Lady Mary spitefully, "but I do mind you being such an ass. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try — Dorothy L. Sayers

It is idle to complain that a society is infringing a moral code intended to make people behave like St. Francis of Assisi if the society retorts that it does not wish to behave like St. Francis, and considers it more natural and right to behave like the Emperor Caligula. When there is a genuine conflict of opinion, it is necessary to go behind the moral code and appeal to the natural law - to prove, that is, at the bar of experience, that St. Francis does in fact enjoy a freer truth to essential human nature than Caligula, and that a society of Caligulas is more likely to end in catastrophe than a society of Franciscans. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The first thing a principle does is kill somebody — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The practical utility of Formal Logic to-day lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference. — Dorothy L. Sayers

What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said. — 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

There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited. — Dorothy L. Sayers

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: ( ... ) that 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. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. — Dorothy L. Sayers

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature! — Dorothy L. Sayers

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. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? — Dorothy L. Sayers

But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

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

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