Dorothy Sayers

“As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them...a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual.”

“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.”

“What do you want me to do, Peter?""Chuck the ball back to me if it runs out of the circle. Not obviously. Just exercise your devastating talent for keeping to the point and speaking the truth.""That sounds easy.""It is--for you. That's what I love you for."--Gaudy Night”

“The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody.--Gaudy Night”

“There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations.”

“She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.”

“If the one thing was right, everything elses must surely be right; the thing was axiomatic. It was true that happiness had often to be wooed, pleaded for, struggled for; but he took it for grantetd that a woman was made like that - she did no come halway to meet desire, or if she did, there was something wrong with her. She shrank instinctively from passion, but her shrinking inflamed it in spite of herself; then, when she reluctantly yielded, here compassion prompted her response. No passion without compassion, no compassion without love, so that her passion was proof positive of her loev. Since every act of love was an act of compliance, it was right to be grateful for it - her surrender was so beautiful - an intoxicating compliment that filled one with a perpetual consciousness of achievement.”

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”