Quotes from Dorothy Sayers

Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place. Here, then, at home …

Now, don't you worry, Mr. Appledore. I'm thinkin' the best thing I can do is to trundle the old lady down to my mother and take her out of your way, otherwise you might be findin' your Christian feelings gettin' the better of you some fine day, and there's nothin' like Christian feelin's for upsettin' a man's domestic comfort.

Here again, the souls 'have what they chose'; they enjoy that kind of after-life which they themselves imagined for the virtuous dead; their failure lay in not imagining better. They are lost because they 'had not faith' — primarily the Christian faith, but also, more generally, faith in the nature of things.

and he was as ready for mischief as a wilderness of monkeys.

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

I has such a sinking in my inside I has to get up and eat biscuits.

He spoke in a series of gruff barks, and held himself so rigidly that if he had swallowed a poker it could only have produced unseemly curves and flexions in his figure.

The basket was opened, and a ginger head emerged resentfully.

Discretion plays a major part in making up the salesman's art, for truths that no one can believe are calculated to deceive.

As the Head of a woman's college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word 'compromise' had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise.

The agents of the miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking, conversion and coincidence;

Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations;