Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 – 1957)
Renowned British author, translator, student of classical and modern languages, and Christian humanist.
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. - Lord Peter Wimsey
We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes. - Charles Parker
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. - Bunter
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. - Lord Peter Wimsey on Remembrance Day observances
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. - Lord Peter Wimsey
The first thing a principle does is kill somebody. - 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. - Lord Peter Wimsey
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.
A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
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. - George Fentiman
Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it. - Lord Peter Wimsey
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.
I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking. - 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
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Those who make some other person their job . . . are dangerous.
The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.
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.
If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle. - Harriet Vane