Dorothy L. Sayers

"Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement"Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow."

"The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things."

"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."

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

"That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying."

"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?... Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?... And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?... Is not the great defect of our education today---a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned---that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning."

"For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."

"I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command."

"What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him."

"I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid."

"this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity... You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also."

"The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come."

"Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away."