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Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes | Quotes said by Dorothy L. Sayers

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #1

    (One character on another:)

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

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #2

    Peter! Were you looking for a horse-shoe?

    No; I was expecting the horse, but the shoe is a piece of pure, gorgeous luck.

    And observation. I found it.

    You did. And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event -- one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant sideshow attached to a detective investigation.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #3

    [I]t's difficult to make people see that what you have been taught counts for nothing, and that the only things worth having are the things you find out for yourself. Also, that when so many brands of what Chesterton calls 'fancy souls' and theories of life are offered you, there is no sense in not looking pretty carefully to see what you are going in for. [...] It isn't a case of 'Here is the Christian religion, the one authoritative and respectable rule of life. Take it or leave it'. It's 'Here's a muddling kind of affair called Life, and here are nineteen or twenty different explanations of it, all supported by people whose opinions are not to be sneezed at. Among them is the Christian religion in which you happpen to have been brought up. Your friend so-and-so has been brought up in quite a different way of thinking; is a perfectly splendid person and thoroughly happy. What are you going to do about it?' -- I'm worrying it out quietly, and whatever I get hold of will be valuable, because I've got it for myself; but really, you know, the whole question is not as simple as it looks.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #4

    [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.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #5

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

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #6

    [On marriage and permanent attachment:]

    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.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #7

    [T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #8

    [W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #9

    A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #10

    A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. Well, said the man, I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing. I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #11

    A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #12

    And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol.
    It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #13

    At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #14

    Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #15

    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?

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #16

    But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #17

    Darling, if you danced like an elderly elephant with arthritis, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea with you. I have waited a thousand years to see you dance in that frock.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #18

    Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #19

    Do you know how to pick a lock?
    Not in the least, I'm afraid.
    I often wonder what we go to school for, said Wimsey.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #20

    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.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #21

    Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #22

    For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #23

    For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #24

    Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?...Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?...And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?...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.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #25

    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.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #26

    He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #27

    Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #28

    Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
    If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #29

    How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do
    Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers Quote #30

    I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

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