Dorothy L. Sayers citations

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"

"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”

“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair… the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”

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

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”

“What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.”

“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.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.”

“Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver: It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: 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.”

“What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?”

“Sir Impey Biggs: Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.”

“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.”

“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.”

“If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.”

“[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.”

“Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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)”

“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.”

“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!”

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