Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

If you want it your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of your own way forever.

It was the room of a woman without taste or moderation, who refused nothing and surrendered nothing, to whom the fact of possession had become the one steadfast reality in a world of loss and change.

It is the dogma that is the drama -- not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death -- but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.

nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular)

Yes, and look at the corpses. Place always reminds me of that old thing in Punch, you know—'Waiter, take away Lord Whatsisname, he's been dead two days.' Look at Old Ormsby there, snoring

Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with 'em, and then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidences of our earlier stages of development.

She suffered much from the adjacent presence of her daughter-in-law, whose misfortune it was to become disagreeable when she was unhappy--perhaps the heaviest curse that can be laid on man, who is born to sorrow.

Sadie, you're the most tactless girl I ever had the bad luck to meet.' But I am enthusiastic. I get carried away. I don't stop to think. I'm just the same with my work. I don't consider my own feelings; I don't consider other people's feelings. I just wade right in and ask for what I want, and I mostly get it.

But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training.

But even a watched pot cannot absorb heat for ever.

His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.

Foster never did anything that was not absolutely correct; this, perhaps, was his real weakness, for it meant that he lacked imagination, both in his work and in handling the men under him.

My lord, there is an individual—" "Oh, send him away. I can't stand any more individuals.

I know when I am well off. You had better come up to me.'     'You know I can't.'     'Of course you can't. You can only go down and down.'     'Are you trying to insult me?'     'Yes, but it's very difficult.

Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.

You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct.

She was a long-necked, long-backed woman, who disciplined her hair and her children. She was never embarrassed, and her anger, though never permitted to be visible, made itself felt the more.

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 borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I'm sure if I'd been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I'd have said: 'Ods-bodikins! There's that girl again!

A person who can believe all the articles of the Christian faith is not going to boggle over a trifle of adverse evidence.

Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising," announced Lord Peter sententiously, "is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.

The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects—but does that always mean that they actually know more?

From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God. -Dorothy L. Sayers

I'll tell you why, Mr. Pomfret. Because you haven't the guts to say No when somebody asks you to be a sport. That tom-fool word has got more people in trouble than all the rest of the dictionary put together. If it's sporting to encourage girls to break rules and drink more than they can carry and get themselves into a mess on your account, then I'd stop being a sport and try being a gentleman.

Mummy, I think I might understand if only you wouldn't explain.