Top 250 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

152. “Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

153. “Novelists and police-inspectors do not always see eye to eye as regards publicity.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

155. “The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

156. “The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

157. “Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

158. “The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated – yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until – bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

159. “The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most “edifying” or “propaganda” literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished. You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

160. “What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

161. “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

162. “Ah, well, as the old pagan said of the Gospels, after all, it was a long time ago, and we’ll hope it wasn’t true.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

163. “Damn it, she writes detective stories and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

164. “People who seek to serve the community end up falsifying their work, she wrote, whether the work is writing a novel or baking bread, because they are not single- mindedly focused on the task at hand. But if you serve the work – if you perform each task to its utmost perfection – then you will experience the deep satisfaction of craftsmanship and you will end up serving the community more richly than you could have consciously planned.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

165. “Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

166. “No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

167. “We dole out lip-service to the importance of education – lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

168. “It’s very inconvenient being a sculptor. It’s like playing the double-bass; one’s so handicapped by one’s baggage.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

169. “My lord, there is an individual – ” “Oh, send him away. I can’t stand any more individuals.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

170. “Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit-fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, “I’ll ask the wife.” Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born- a perfectly womanly woman.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

171. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

172. “You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do – merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

173. “I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don’t understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

174. “What was that you called me?’ ‘Oh, Peter – how absurd! I wasn’t thinking.’ ‘What did you call me?’ ‘My lord!’ ‘The last two words in the language I ever expected to get a kick out of. One never values a thing till one’s earned it, does one? Listen, heart’s lady – before I’ve done I mean to be king and emperor.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

175. “Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

176. “I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit – not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

177. “She is a very conscientious person,” said Miss Lydgate, “but she has rather an unfortunate knack of making any subject sound dull. It’s a great pity, because she is exceptionally sound and dependable. However, that doesn’t greatly matter in her present appointment; she holds a librarianship somewhere – Miss.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

178. “That there is a secret itself is a secret.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

179. “Most people don’t associate anythin’ – their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin’ a lot of noise and goin’ nowhere, but once you begin lettin’ ‘em string their peas into a necklace, it’s goin’ to be strong enough to hang you, what?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

180. “She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

181. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

182. “Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

183. “The sun is shining, and I am in the mood to make mistakes through over-confidence.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

185. “There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one’s own limitations.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

186. “Is not the great defect of our education today – a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned – that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

187. “I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

188. “The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects – but does that always mean that they actually know more?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

189. “I dare say that’s an idea which has already occurred to you, but with the weight of my great mind behind it, no doubt it strikes the imagination more forcibly.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

190. “But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

191. “Darling, if you danced like an elderly elephant with arthritis, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea with you. I have waited a thousand years to see you dance in that frock.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

192. “I know what you’re thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

193. “It was the room of a woman without taste or moderation, who refused nothing and surrendered nothing, to whom the fact of possession had become the one steadfast reality in a world of loss and change.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

194. “Five minutes’ practice before the glass every day, and you will soon acquire that vacant look so desirable for all rogues, detectives and Government officials.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

195. “No,” said Harriet, who had been exercising.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

196. “I think,’ said Bredon, who was accustomed to his father’s meaningless outbursts of speech, ‘she’s silly.’ ‘So do I; but don’t say I said so.’ ‘And rude.’ ‘And rude. I, on the other hand, am silly, but seldom rude. Your mother is neither rude nor silly.’ ‘Which am I?’ ‘You are an egotistical extravert of the most irrepressible type.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

198. “Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

199. “Boil my brains!” said Lord Peter. “Boil ’em and mash ’em and serve ’em up with butter as a dish of turnips, for it’s damn well all they’re fit for! Look at me!”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

200. “It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers