Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

You ought to be on the jury," retorted Wimsey, with unusual acidity, "I bet that's what they're all saying at this moment. I'm convinced that that foreman is a teetotaller—I saw ginger-beer going into the jury-room, and I only hope it explodes and blows his inside through the top of his skull.

The main lights of its eight great windows were darkened throughout their height; only through the slender panelled tracery above the slanting louvers the sunlight dripped rare and chill, striping the heavy beams of the bell-cage with bars and splashes of pallid gold, and making a curious fantastic patterning on the spokes and rims of the wheels. The bells, with mute black mouths gaping downwards, brooded in their ancient places.

We've no quarrel with the Church, you know, if she'll stick to her business and leave us to ours." "My dear man, if you can cure sin with an injection, I shall be only too pleased.

By that time we shall, I hope, be moving in different circles. I shall be in the one devoted to murderers, and you in the much lower and hotter one devoted to those who tempt others to murder them.

Now, actors and scenery are fully imbued with the general tiresomeness of all material things; in the random landslide to chaos they are particularly slippery and hard to check;

The fenman gazed at Wimsey with a slow pity for his bird-witted feebleness of mind.

That's better,' said Wimsey. 'Napoleon or somebody said that you could always turn a tragedy into a comedy by sittin' down.

What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.

the words "problem" and "solution" as commonly used, belong to the analytic approach to phenomena, and not to the creative.

I say - I don't mind betting this is the most popular thing Campbell ever did. Nothing in life became him like the leaving of it, eh, what?

The drains in my weekend cottage got stopped up last Sunday, and a most helpful neighbor came and unstopped them. He got quite filthy in the process and I apologized profusely, but he said I owed him no thanks, because he was inquisitive and liked drains.

of my own honesty.

Ain't she the snail's ankles?' asked Mr da Soto admiringly.

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

the noiseless tenor of our way

She did not grudge him his entertainment; being old enough to know that even the most crashing social bricks make but a small ripple in the ocean of time, which quickly dies away.

That was the second time within five minutes that he had warned her off his private ground. His mood had changed since the early hours of the afternoon and all his defences were up once more. She could not again disregard the 'No Thoroughfare' sign; so she left it to him to start a fresh subject.

True,' replied Wimsey. 'As G. K. C. says, "I'd rather be alive than not".

Bloody little fool!" said Sergeant Bunter.

Reading maketh a full man—" "Conference a ready man," said Harriet. "And writing an exact man," said the Superintendent. "Mind that, Joe Sellon, and see you let me have them notes so as they can be read to make sense.

Francis Bacon," said Peter, a trifle belatedly. "Mr. Kirk, you're a man after my own heart.

There, eastward, within a stone's throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls', fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her

This is the Christian faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved." The harsh and much-disputed statement begins to look like a blunt statement of fact, for how can anyone make anything of life if there is no belief in life? If we truly desire a creative life for ourselves and other people, it is our task to rebuild the world along creative lines, but we must be sure that we desire it enough.

If avarice is the sin of the haves against the have-nots, envy is the sin of the have-nots against the haves. If we want to see what they look like on a big scale, we may say that avarice has been the sin of the Anglo-Saxon democracies, and envy the sin of Germany. Both are cruel—the one with a heavy, complacent, and bloodless cruelty; the other with a violent, calculated, and savage cruelty. But Germany only displays in accentuated form an evil of which we have plenty at home.