Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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

Lord Peter Wimsey: Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

Sir Impey Biggs: Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.

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)

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: Your mother, Bunter? Oh, I never knew you had one. I always thought you just sort of came along already-made, so it were.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver: It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things.

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.

Lord Peter Wimsey: I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.

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