Gaudy Night

by Dorothy L. Sayers

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar.'

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilisation that made them.'

Perhaps that's the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don't snatch; if you snatch, you don't really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it's a proof of its importance to you?'

... 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 you find it easy to get drunk on words?' 'So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Which accounts for my talking so much.'

'Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face however difficult it may be.'

"The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit."