Dorothy L. Sayers

Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.

She had her image_ and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper__nd this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

_After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox. 'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter

She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along__nd came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.

Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me.""People have been wrongly condemned before now.""Exactly; simply because I wasn't there.""I never thought of that.

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

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

The only Christian work is good work well done.

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is_ limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death__e had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world__ history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

[On marriage and permanent attach

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?