Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity, and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

[On marriage and permanent attach

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

The only Christian work is good work well done.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along—and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken.My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

But if you were investigating a crime,” said Lady Swaffham, “you’d have to begin by the usual things, I suppose — finding out what the person had been doing, and who’d been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn’t you?”“Oh, yes,” said Lord Peter, “but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin’ all sorts of inoffensive people. There’s lots of people I’d like to murder, wouldn’t you?”“Heaps,” said Lady Swaffham.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual…Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Salcombe Hardy groaned: How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

(One character on another:)Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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

~ Dorothy L. Sayers