Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

There's something hypnotic about the word tea.

Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper

I say, I don't think the human frame is very thoughtfully constructed for this sleuthhound business. If one could go on all fours, or had eyes in ones knees, it would be a lot more practical'… 'What luck! Here's a deep, damp ditch on the other side, which I shall now proceed to fall into.' A slithering crash proclaimed that he had carried out his intention.

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

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.

The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second.

My idea is that Miss Vane didn't do it, said Wimsey. I dare say that's an idea which has already occurred to you, but with the weight of my great mind behind it, no doubt it strikes the imagination more forcibly.

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?

Experience has taught me, said Peter (...) that no situation finds Bunter unprepared. That he should have procured The Times this morning by the simple expedient of asking the milkman to request the postmistress to telephone to Broxford and have it handed to the 'bus-conductor to be dropped at the post-office and brought up by the little girl who delivers the telegrams is a trifling example of his resourceful energy.

I do know the worst sin--perhaps the only sin--passion can commit, is to be joyless.

Don't be so damned discouraging, said Wimsey. I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me. People have been wrongly condemned before now. Exactly; simply because I wasn't there. I never thought of that.

the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

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?

N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson, and you need not say what you were just going to say, because I admit it all.

I always think that the franker you are with people, the more you're likely to deceive 'em; so unused is the modern world to the open hand and the guileless heart

She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.

Well, well -- the prizes all go to the women who 'play their cards well' -- but if they can only be won in that way, I would rather lose the game ... [C]lever [women] bide their time -- make themselves indispensable first, and then se font prier [=play hard to get]. Clever -- but I can't do it.

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

Is not the great defect of our education today—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.

I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.

I like to crawl away and hide in a corner. Well, he said, with a transitory gleam of himself, you're my corner and I've come to hide.

Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?