Dorothy L. Sayers

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?" "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.

. . . the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

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.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

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.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.

As I grow older and older, _x000D_ _x000D_ And totter toward the tomb, _x000D_ _x000D_ I find that I care less and less _x000D_ _x000D_ Who goes to bed with whom.

If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever.

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

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.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.

The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama.

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.