Dorothy L. Sayers

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

The story of Passion-Tide and Easter is the story of the winning of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of Time. The burden of the guilt is accepted ("He was made Sin"), the last agony of alienation from God is passed through (Eloi, lama sabachthani ); the temporal Body is broken and remade; and Time and Eternity are reconciled in a Single Person. There is no retreat here to the Paradise of primal ignorance; the new Kingdom of God is built upon the foundations of spiritual experience. Time is not denied; it is fulfilled. "I am the food of the full- grown."

— Dorothy L. Sayers

All normal children (however much we discourage them) look forward to growing up. "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 see the Kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day one must be born again.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn’t believe in marriage—and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

… the lovely satisfying unity of things—the wedding of the thing learnt and the thing done—the great intellectual fulfillment.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

There is no waste with God. He cancels nothing but redeems all.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

There is perhaps one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job’s sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

Once lay down the rule that the job comes first, and you throw that job open to every individual … who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

There is no solution to death … Life intends to kill us.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“A desire to have all the fun,” he says, “is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word “daffy-down-dilly.” It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a “daffy-down-dilly.” Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

People who make some other person their job are dangerous.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

And a continued atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven’t got any of your own.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

… of all devils let loose in the world there is no devil like devoted love ….

— Dorothy L. Sayers

… love’s a nervous, awkward, overmastering brute; if you can’t rein him in it’s best to have no truck with him.

— Dorothy L. Sayers