Gaudy Night Quotes

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"

"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”
― Dorothy Sayers , Gaudy Night

“The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“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, Gaudy Night

“A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize 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.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“He was being about as protective as a can-opener.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Placetne, magistra?"

"Placet.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“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.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?"

"You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“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. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“There's something hypnotic about the word tea.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“I do know the worst sin--perhaps the only sin--passion can commit, is to be joyless.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“There’s something hypnotic about the word ‘tea’. I’m asking you to enjoy the beauties of the English countryside; to tell me your adventures and hear mine; to plan a campaign involving the comfort and reputation of two-hundred people; to honor me with your sole presence and to bestow upon me the illusion of paradise, and I speak as though the pre-eminent object of all desire were a pot of boiled water and a plateful of synthetic pastries in Ye Olde Worlde Tudor Tea Shoppe.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do—merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.

"Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job.”
“Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night