Quotes from book

Gaudy Night

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Lord Peter Wimsey: The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.”

“Miss de Vine: [In response to Harriet Vane's, "But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job?"] "Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous."”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it – that is at the bottom of the ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ.”

“Freddie Arbuthnot*: "…mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery."”