Dorothy L. Sayers

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day _ for a bit, anyhow.

We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

(One character on another:)"Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?

The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.

Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.

Do you know how to pick a lock?""Not in the least, I'm afraid.""I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey.

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!

Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.

The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual_Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered.

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

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.

The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.

But if you were investigating a crime,_ said Lady Swaffham, __ou__ have to begin by the usual things, I suppose _ finding out what the person had been doing, and who__ been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn__ you?___h, yes,_ said Lord Peter, __ut most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin_ all sorts of inoffensive people. There__ lots of people I__ like to murder, wouldn__ you?___eaps,_ said Lady Swaffham.

Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken."My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?""There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent.

Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.