Dorothy L. Sayers citations

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“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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)”

“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.”

“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.”

“But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.”

“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.”

“It pays to advertise! - her best-known slogan for S. H. Benson's, then one of Britain's most prominent advertising firms (Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Berg, 1990, p. 194)”

“And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home. - Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane, now his wife”

“Mr. Hankin: …the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client.”

“George Fentiman: What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.”

“Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.”

“Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Wait a second… I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important.
Lady Mary Wimsey: Everything I say is useful and important.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: She has a sense of humor… and brains… life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed… and that would be jolly too.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith. The only man who ever managed to see through rudeness was Saint Augustine.”

“Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.”

“Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes.”

“Bunter: My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved.”