Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

He has the valuable quality of being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.

The sun is shining, and I am in the mood to make mistakes through over-confidence.

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.

The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.

I hope you won't mind, because I haven't shaved since this morning, but I'm going to take you round the next quiet corner and kiss you.

Thank you. This line of salt is the beach. And this piece of bread is a rock at low-water level.' Wimsey twitched his chair closer to the table. 'And this salt-spoon,' he said, with childlike enjoyment, 'can be the body.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.

Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try

in the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.

We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March

Most people don't associate anythin'--their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?

Thank God!' said Wimsey. 'Where there is a church, there is civilisation.

The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you'll feel all the better.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.

Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?' is a question a little remote from us, says one of the characters in The Man Born to Be King. Why, madam, did he not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did he not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.