Quotes from Dorothy Sayers

So she will, said the Dowager. You'll see that young man in the Cabinet before very long. Such a handsome couple on a public platform, and very sound, I'm told, about pigs, and that's so important, the British breakfast-table being what it is.

People who seek to serve the community end up falsifying their work, she wrote, whether the work is writing a novel or baking bread, because they are not single- mindedly focused on the task at hand. But if you serve the work— if you perform each task to its utmost perfection— then you will experience the deep satisfaction of craftsmanship and you will end up serving the community more richly than you could have consciously planned.

if the M.C.C. were to agree, in a thoughtless moment, that the ball must be so hit by the batsman that it should never come down to earth again, cricket would become an impossibility. A vivid sense of reality usually restrains sports committees from promulgating laws of this kind; other legislators occasionally lack this salutary realism.

I wanted it all to be wonderful for you.' She waited for him to find his own answer to this, which he did with disarming swiftness. 'That's vanity, I suppose. Take pen and ink and write it down. His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.

Did you want to be a missionary in your youth? I did. I think most kids do some time or another, which is odd, seein how unsatisfactory most of us turn out.

Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations;

You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.' 'I'm afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.' 'It might be the wisest thing you could do.' 'Write it out and get rid of it?' 'Yes.' 'I'll think about that. It would hurt like hell.' 'What would that matter, if it made a good book?

his thoughts revolving silently in this squirrel-cage of mystification.

You had decided to take the action, whatever it was."   "Yes."   "Yes. It involved perhaps a period of inaction."   "Of comparative inaction—yes."   "Of suspense, shall we say?"   "Yes—of suspense, certainly."   "Possibly

It is always reasonably easy to get conversation going in a pub, and it will be a black day for detectives when beer is abolished. After

When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.

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.