Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Harriet Vane: I know what you're thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling 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 feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.

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.

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

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: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window.