Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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?

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

The first thing a principle does is kill somebody

What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

There is no solution to death.Life intends to kill us.

There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.

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

[Did you] ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?

It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there. It seems so much more likely that the money is there and only needs bawling for.

Anythin' wrong leaves a kind of impression on the eye; brain trots along afterwards with the warnin'.

there is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

Advertising never sold a bad product twice.

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

Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.

Why? Oh, well - I thought you'd be rather an attractive person to marry. That's all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can't tell you why. There's no rule about it, you know.

Plain lies are dangerous.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

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

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

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.

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

Placetne, magistra?" "Placet.

We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

I am better off with vegetables at the bottom of my garden than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.

Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.

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.

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.

Britain possesses no climate, only weather.

The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

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

But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues

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

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.

There's truth as far as you knows it; and there's truth as far as you're asked for it. But they don't represent the whole truth - not necessarily.

all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.

There's ways and ways of dyin'. Some is took, and some takes French leave, and others is 'elped out of life.

Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular.

Well-bred English people never have imagination.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

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

Advertise, or go under.

We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.