Dorothy L. Sayers: Trending quotes

“We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.”

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Source: Busman's Honeymoon

“We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.”

Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

“To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

(, 8 September 1935)”

Source: Gaudy Night

“I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.”

Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

“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!”

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Source: Catholic Tales and Christian Songs

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

Source: Gaudy Night

“Lord Peter Wimsey: 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.”

Source: Busman's Honeymoon

“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.”

Gaudy Night (1936)

“What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?…God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.”

Source: Busman's Honeymoon

“She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.”

Essays, The Triumph of Easter (1938)
Source: The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays

“It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.”

Source: Busman's Honeymoon

“A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”

Source: Gaudy Night

“The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

(, 8 September 1935)”

Essays, Are Women Human? (1938)

“To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.”

Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

Dorothy L. Sayers book The Mind of the Maker

Source: The Mind of the Maker

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”