Quotessence
Home / Authors / Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsMenPeopleThinkingKnowsMindWellsFirstsHumansWorld

Famous Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

“Why do you want a letter from me? Why don't you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don't you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular 'experts' who have picked it up as inaccurately as you? Why don't you learn the facts in this field as honestly as your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook on church history will tell you where they came from? Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=mc2? What makes you suppose that the expression "God ordains" is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression, "Science demands" is taken as an objective statement of fact? You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs. I admit, you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar. Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I'm giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don't bother. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine.”

Christian Apologetics
Author:Dorothy L. Sayers
Create image

“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”

MenWritingWomenNaturalFictionFeminismConversationPrejudiceGenderMisogynyStereotypesDouble StandardsWomen WritersClichés
Book:Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
Create image

“I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.”

WritingWomenFictionFeminism
Book:Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
Create image

“This recognition of the truth we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, “Yes, yes, very good, very true—that’s just what I’m always saying.” I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.”

WritingArt
Book:The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays
Create image

“The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. (Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)”

WritingHonestyIntegrityExpectationsCreative ProcessSelf ExpressionOn WritingSelling OutPandering
Book:The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
Create image

“It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.”

LoveWritingGodChristianityTrinitarian
Book:The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
Create image

“We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.”

GodWriting ProcessTrinityTrinitarianWriti
Book:The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
Create image

“It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.”

GovernmentSuccessWomenHistoryFeminismSkillsGenderHypocrisyMisogynyReignCareerStereotypesAchievementsAbilitiesDouble StandardsGood GovernanceClichésQueen Elizabeth I
Book:Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
Create image

“Peter! Were you looking for a horse-shoe?" "No; I was expecting the horse, but the shoe is a piece of pure, gorgeous luck." "And observation. I found it." "You did. And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event -- one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant sideshow attached to a detective investigation.”

HumorImportanceLuckBanterHorsesKissesHorse Shoes
Book:Have His Carcase
Create image

“Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that ‘Bridegroom’ imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort of thing doesn’t make much appeal to well-balanced women, who look on it as just another example of men’s hopeless romanticism about sex, and who are apt either to burst out laughing or sniff a faint smell of drains.”

ChristianityFeminineMasculinePriesthoodWomen S Ordination
Author:Dorothy L. Sayers
Create image

“Worldly people, you see, use far more wisdom, about their trifling affairs than unworldly people do about the affairs of God. They give their minds to what they are doing. And I say to you. Learn from them. Learn how to deal with the world and make friends with worldly people, so that when everything earthly fails you may know the way to their hearts. The man who is reliable in little things is reliable in great things too—and if you can’t handle the goods of this world, how can you be trusted to handle the true treasures of Heaven?”

Worldly Wisdom
Book:The Man Born to Be King
Create image

“See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.”

TruthScienceValuesHonestyIntegrityLiesTreasonAcademiaOxfordVeracityFalsificationScholars
Book:The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
Create image

“JESUS: because the love was so great, the sin is all forgiven. LAZARUS: Kind Rabbi, you told me so, when I fell at your feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee... Did you know? my companions and I came there that day to mock you. We thought you would be sour and grim, hating all beauty and treating life as an enemy. But when I saw you, I was amazed. you were the only person there that was really alive. The rest of us were going about half-dead—making the gestures of life, pretending to be real people. The life was not with us but with you—intense and shining, like the strong sun when it rises and turns the flames of our candles to pale smoke. And I wept and was ashamed, seeing myself such a thing of trash and tawdry. But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning.”

LoveLifeLightSinBeautyForgivenessMeaning Of Life
Book:The Man Born to Be King
Create image

“It seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy. On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash.”

IfsShouldLooksKindIdeasSeemsCertainChristianityAchievementEternalShould HaveContraryRealisticWorldlyTrashUnrealInsistingIdealistic
Author:Dorothy L. Sayers
Create image

“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.”

FormThreeCoursesMassBlowBreadAdvertisingMealsGasQuantitySuitableCrudeMisrepresentationYeast
Book:Murder Must Advertise
Create image