Dorothy Leigh Sayers (/ˈsɛərz/ ; 13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer and poet. She was also a student of classical and modern languages.
You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair. . . the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain; If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.
The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.
There's ways and ways of dyin'. Some is took, and some takes French leave, and others is 'elped out of life.
Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine-tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck the surface with a noice like a wet kiss, and vanished instantly. With that instinct which prompts one, when depressed, to wallow in every circumstance of gloom, Peter leaned sadly against the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great war; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will.
[Did you] ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?
Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.
Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.
It is as dangerous for people unaccustomed to handling words and unacquainted with their technique to tinker about with these heavily-charged nuclei of emotional power as it would be for me to burst into a laboratory and play about with a powerful electromagnet or other machine highly charged with electrical force.
Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.
. . . at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.
First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.
I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.
Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.
make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.