Gaudy Night (Lord Peter Wimsey, #12)

by Dorothy L. Sayers

All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.”

As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life.

“The trouble is,” said the Librarian, “that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.”

Be a fool if you like—I’ve been a fool in my time and so have most people—but for Heaven’s sake do it somewhere where you won’t let other people down.”

But when men put their public lives before their private lives, it causes less outcry than when a woman does the same thing, because women put up with neglect better than men, having been brought up to expect it.”

if there’s any subject in which you’re content with the second-rate, then it isn’t really your subject.”

if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it’s a proof of its importance to you?” “I think it is, to a large extent. But the big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors, of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring.

“However painful it is, there’s always one thing one has to deal with sincerely, if there’s any root to one’s mind at all.

God! how I loathe haste and violence and all that ghastly, slippery cleverness. Unsound, unscholarly, insincere—nothing but propaganda and special pleading and ‘what do we get out of this?’ No time, no peace, no silence; nothing but conferences and newspapers and public speeches till one can’t hear one’s self think …If only one could root one’s self in here among the grass and stones and do something worth doing, even if it was only restoring a lost breathing for the love of the job and nothing else.”

Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour’s slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot beat quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men’s oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon’s minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it.

“To suppress a fact is to publish a falsehood.”

To subdue one’s self to one’s own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes.