Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

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

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 ushered into the presence.

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 than the last.

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

I have rather an unwholesome weakness for policemen.

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 somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

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 been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.

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, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.

_'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 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.

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.

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

Lord Peter Wimsey stretched himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hotel Meurice.

But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you--though that's nothing new.

It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story.

By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words.

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.

Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by Raffles and Sherlock Holmes, or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox. 'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter

The banks of the Thirty-Foot held, but the swollen Wale, receiving the full force of the Upper Waters and the spring tide, gave at every point. Before the cars reached St. Paul, the flood was rising and pursuing them. Wimsey's car--the last to start--was submerged to the axles. They fled through the dusk, and behind and on their left, the great silver sheet of water spread and spread.

there's nothin' like Christian feelin's for upsettin' a man's domestic comfort.

Bother the right man!" cried Miss Findlater, crossly. "I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.

What was that you called me?' 'Oh, Peter – how absurd! I wasn't thinking.' 'What did you call me?' 'My lord!' 'The last two words in the language I ever expected to get a kick out of. One never values a thing till one's earned it, does one? Listen, heart's lady – before I've done I mean to be king and emperor.

The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations.