Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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.

Sir Impey Biggs: 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.

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.

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.

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: The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.

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: She has a sense of humor... and brains... life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed... and that would be jolly too.

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.

The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world.

Lord Peter Wimsey: It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it won’t do to say so. (on Remembrance Day observances)

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.

George Fentiman: What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.

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)