Dorothy L. Sayers

Throw that dreary man Cicero out of the window, and request the divine Virgil (with the utmost love and respect) to take a seat along with his fellow-Augustans and the First Consul, until your pupils are ready to be ushe…

"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."

I have rather an unwholesome weakness for policemen.

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have b…

Salcombe Hardy groaned: How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.

... protested Mrs. Featherstone, a lady in her thirties, whose violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather t…

I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.

Like all male creatures Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom.

Pray silence for the soloist. But let him be soon over, that we may hear the great striding fugue again.

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…

I beg your pardon, said Lord Peter, I was quoting poetry. Very silly of me. I got the habit at my mother's knee and I can't break myself of it.

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…

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

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 optim…

She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.

Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it-still more, because of it-that liking has very great value, beca…

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…

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 i…

Damn it, she writes detective stories and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have.

When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: 'Why should women want to know about Aristotle?' The answer is NOT that all women wo…

At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied. Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling 'still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibl…

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,…

"...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…

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all t…

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…

He had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognised the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achieve…

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to the University in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are w…

The sin of our times is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing and remains alive be…

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.
"Yes," said Harriet,…

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.

"By all means," said Harriet. "Where did you come from?"
"From London--like a bird that hears the call of its mate."
"I didn't--" began Harriet.
"I didn't mean you. I meant the corpse. But still, talking of mates, will y…

"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 buil…

"So I am a Socialist," said Ingleby, "but I can't stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn't happen."
"If everybody had the same face," said Bredon, "there'…

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 ed…

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

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. 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…

One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers, said Lady Swaffham. Like dramatists, you know--so much easier in Shakespeare's time, wasn't it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that…

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

[I]t's difficult to make people see that what you have been taught counts for nothing, and that the only things worth having are the things you find out for yourself. Also, that when so many brands of what Chesterton cal…

"Why would your 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 it all, I seem to be saying all the wrong t…

In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the 'solution'must be brought in from…

You needn't try to bully me, young man, said that octogenarian with spirit, settin'there spoilin'your stomach with them nasty jujubes.

Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct…

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…

Harriet was silent. She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamoured, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of utter…

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 thin…

"I say—I've thought of a good plot for a detective story."
"Really?"
"Top-hole. You know, the sort that people bring out and say 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if only I could find time to sit down and write it.…

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.

It is a formidable list of jobs: the whole of the spinning industry, the whole of the dyeing industry, the whole of the weaving industry. The whole catering industry and'which would not please Lady Astor, perhaps'the who…

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