Top 250 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Yes – but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won’t understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they’ll be surprised to discover that you are really hard and heartless, they’ll be quite wrong both times – but they won’t ever know it, and you won’t know it at first, and it’ll worry you.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

202. “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

203. “It will be sent that, although the writer’s love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

204. “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

205. “I beg your pardon,” said Lord Peter, “I was quoting poetry. Very silly of me. I got the habit at my mother’s knee and I can’t break myself of it.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

206. “May I express the hope that the present union may happily exemplify that which we find in a first-class port – strength of body fortified by a first-class spirit and mellowing through many years to a noble maturity. My lord and my lady – your very good health!”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

207. “Oh! are you detecting now?’ ‘Like anything. If you could take the top of my head off, you would see the wheels whizzing round.’ ‘I see. You’re not detecting me, I hope.’ ‘Everybody always hopes that.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

208. “There’s something hypnotic about the word ‘tea’. I’m asking you to enjoy the beauties of the English countryside; to tell me your adventures and hear mine; to plan a campaign involving the comfort and reputation of two-hundred people; to honor me with your sole presence and to bestow upon me the illusion of paradise, and I speak as though the pre-eminent object of all desire were a pot of boiled water and a plateful of synthetic pastries in Ye Olde Worlde Tudor Tea Shoppe.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

209. “The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

210. “But even a watched pot cannot absorb heat for ever.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

211. “He has the valuable quality of being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

212. “Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations;.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

213. “I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

214. “Possessiveness isn’t unprecedented.’ ‘On the contrary – it’s as common as mud. But to recognise it in one’s self and chuck it overboard is – unusual. If you want to be a normal person, my girl, you should let it rip and give yourself and everybody else hell with it. And you should call it something else – devotion or self-sacrifice and that sort of thing. If you go on behaving with all this reason and generosity, everybody will think we don’t give a damn for one another.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

215. “She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

216. “We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

217. “And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

218. “Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

219. “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

220. “How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

221. “Why doesn’t God smite this dictator dead?′ is a question a little remote from us,” says one of the characters in The Man Born to Be King. “Why, madam, did he not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did he not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

222. “Yet no woman had ever so stirred his blood; she had only to look or speak to make the very bones shake in his body.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

223. “She was a long-necked, long-backed woman, who disciplined her hair and her children. She was never embarrassed, and her anger, though never permitted to be visible, made itself felt the more.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

224. “All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

225. “For among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

226. “Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

228. “Bother the right man!” cried Miss Findlater, crossly. “I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful – like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

229. “His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

230. “A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

231. “After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you’ll feel all the better.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

232. “Sadie, you’re the most tactless girl I ever had the bad luck to meet.’ But I am enthusiastic. I get carried away. I don’t stop to think. I’m just the same with my work. I don’t consider my own feelings; I don’t consider other people’s feelings. I just wade right in and ask for what I want, and I mostly get it.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

233. “Thank you. This line of salt is the beach. And this piece of bread is a rock at low-water level.’ Wimsey twitched his chair closer to the table. ‘And this salt-spoon,’ he said, with childlike enjoyment, ’can be the body.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

234. “Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King’s Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon’s changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist’s only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

235. “I’ve hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die – only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

236. “I hope you won’t mind, because I haven’t shaved since this morning, but I’m going to take you round the next quiet corner and kiss you.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

237. “A person who can believe all the articles of the Christian faith is not going to boggle over a trifle of adverse evidence.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

238. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

239. “Mummy, I think I might understand if only you wouldn’t explain.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

240. “I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

241. “Within, a cheerful bustle in the bar announced the near arrival of opening time. Eight ducks crossed the road in Indian file. A cat sprang up upon the bench, stretched herself, tucked her hind legs under her and coiled her tail tightly round them as though to prevent them from accidentally working loose. A groom passed, riding a tall bay horse and leading a chestnut with a hogged mane; a spaniel followed them, running ridiculously, with one ear flopped inside-out over his foolish head.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

242. “This was a syllogistic monstrosity even worse than the last, thought Wimsey. A man who could reason like that could not reason at all. He constructed a new syllogism for himself. The man who committed this murder was not a fool. Weldon is a fool. Therefore Weldon did not commit this murder. That appeared to be sound, so far as it went.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

243. “With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

244. “To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

245. “Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax,” agreed the curly man.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

246. “Like all male creatures Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

247. “So she will,” said the Dowager. “You’ll see that young man in the Cabinet before very long. Such a handsome couple on a public platform, and very sound, I’m told, about pigs, and that’s so important, the British breakfast-table being what it is.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

248. “It is always reasonably easy to get conversation going in a pub, and it will be a black day for detectives when beer is abolished. After.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

249. “She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

250. “But that’s men all over. They want the thing done and then, of course, they don’t like the consequences. Poor dears, they can’t help it. They haven’t got logical minds.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers