Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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

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

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

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.

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. (Ch. 21)

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)

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.

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

Mr. Ingleby: You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct.

Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.

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

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

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.

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.

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.