The collection / 113 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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113 results · Page 3 of 5Play this collection ▷

01Undated

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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02Undated

Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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03Undated

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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04Undated

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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05Undated

[On marriage and permanent attach

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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06Undated

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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07Undated

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world’s history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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08Undated

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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09Undated

The only Christian work is good work well done.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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10Undated

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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11Undated

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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12Undated

Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me.""People have been wrongly condemned before now.""Exactly; simply because I wasn't there.""I never thought of that.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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13Undated

She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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14Undated

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along—and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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15Undated

Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox. 'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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16Undated

…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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17Undated

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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18Undated

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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19Undated

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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20Undated

Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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21Undated

The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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22Undated

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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23Undated

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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24Undated

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers / quote

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