470 Quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers

Yes – but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won’t understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they’ll be surprised to discover that you are really hard and heartless, they’ll be quite wrong both times – but they won’t ever know it, and you won’t know it at first, and it’ll worry you.

After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you’ll feel all the better.

I do know the worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.

Mummy, I think I might understand if only you wouldn’t explain.

It will be sent that, although the writer’s love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.

I often think when a man’s once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.

Most people don’t associate anythin’ – their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin’ a lot of noise and goin’ nowhere, but once you begin lettin’ ‘em string their peas into a necklace, it’s goin’ to be strong enough to hang you, what?

She couldn’t have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.

I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit – not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.