Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.

Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.

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)

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

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved.

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.

Mr. Hankin: ...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client.

Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes.

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.

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

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home.

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.

Harriet Vane: But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job?
Miss de Vine: Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous.