470 Quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, “ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.” One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

I think,’ said Bredon, who was accustomed to his father’s meaningless outbursts of speech, ‘she’s silly.’ ‘So do I; but don’t say I said so.’ ‘And rude.’ ‘And rude. I, on the other hand, am silly, but seldom rude. Your mother is neither rude nor silly.’ ‘Which am I?’ ‘You are an egotistical extravert of the most irrepressible type.

I’ve hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die – only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

Why? Oh, well – I thought you’d be rather an attractive person to marry. That’s all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can’t tell you why. There’s no rule about it, you know.

The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations.

The first thing a principle does is kill somebody.

God wastes nothing – not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it’s experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense “makes it good.”

But even a watched pot cannot absorb heat for ever.

Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with ‘em, and then we grow out of ‘em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.