Quotes from book
Gaudy Night

Name: Gaudy Night
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Gaudy Night is a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the tenth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and the third including Harriet Vane.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

“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.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

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.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

“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.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

“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.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

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.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

“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 book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

“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."”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

“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.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)
Source: From Aristotle's Poetics: the right way to tell lies.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

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